


consider them both, the sea and the land

by youremyqueen



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Developing Relationship, M/M, Post-Season/Series 03, Work In Progress, not season 4 compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-08-12 16:28:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7941361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You and I are the war."</p><p>Or: how Nassau got its groove back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> aka: all of my post s3 wishes rolled into one big mess, which started as just a silver/flint fic but devolved into a full cast shabang, feat. too much plot & not enough dick. (i promise parts 2 & 3 will have more dick.). i really just wanted to write a fic where silver & flint didn't fall into bed together, but awkwardly circled the bed for 10k while talking shit and trying not to feel their feelings.
> 
> includes background max/anne and silver/madi, minor violence, some poorly employed and barely understood nautical terminology, and a lot of liberties taken with canon. i probably should have edited more, but i'm just a weak soul who loves the queer pirate squad and wanted an excuse to wax poetic about james flint's body language.
> 
> title is from herman melville's moby dick (ya girl's personal favorite sea faring novel).
> 
> thanks for reading! (and extra special thx to reluming on tumblr for all the encouragement & kindness.)

Flint called it the round table once, off-handedly. A stab at a crowd-pleasing literary reference that had flown above the heads of half the company, and below the brows of the rest. Rackham calls it the poor man’s Westminster, or, sometimes, “the new world’s dullest game of cards.” Madi knows little of England or the woes and japes of those who had been born free on her soil, but she listens intently, watches the faces of her fellows, and learns. She is the one who begins calling it The Maroon Council, and that is the name that sticks, that expands, travels over the water and up Nassau’s shores, into the streets, into the brothel, into the ears of townspeople and the ears of spies. That is the name that wakes Governor Rogers in cold sweats of a night, or so it’s said.

“It’s also said that Eleanor Guthrie sleeps beside him,” Rackham says, mug in hand, stretching the cadence of every word into twice its original length. “Talk may be true, or it may not.”

“It matters little, either way, if Rogers knows our name, our number, or our thrice-damned battle-cry. He knows of us. He knows his enemies have united against him. That fear is enough.” Teach thinks in simple structures: fear, hate, love, vengeance. That is not to say that he is without wit or strategic wisdom, but he loathes the convoluted, loathes the allegories that their campaign is built upon. He wants fresh blood upon his sword. Political subterfuge bores him.

Political subterfuge had once bored John. Once, and not all that long ago, he had dreamed of gold in glistening warm piles, artless women in white linens feeding him fruits by hand, and little else. He had cared everything for riches and nothing for power. He had hated the sea. 

“While I agree,” he says slowly, drawing his eyes up from the scuffed wood of the table and with them commanding attention, “that the governor is in no danger of sleeping comfortably through the night as it is, I do believe that Billy is correct in thinking that attaching a name to something multiplies its power. A name travels more easily and threatens more succinctly than the indefinite idea of danger.”

Rackham snorts indelicately. “It’s no great wonder that you agree with our young Mr. Bones, given that it’s your name that he’s decided to pen into infamy.”

The room turns itself to John. Eyes stay fixed upon parchment, hands upon cups, but he can feel the collective attention shift, heighten. The tales of Long John Silver and his black circle and his hangman’s noose have not gone without remark, but the council has been thus far restrained in its criticisms, as if awaiting a cue from Flint as to the appropriate level of insult and disparagement.

Flint has given them nothing, and gives even less now. He leans back in his chair, elbows resting upon his knees, and observes the exchange with sober disinterest.

John smiles with his eyes and crosses one hand over the other. “I don’t remember asking him to do that.”

Rackham nods, the movement jerky and uncommitted. “To be sure, but you aren’t complaining, are you?”

“Every crusade needs a face.” John tries not to appear self-satisfied, but they all must know. “Mine just happens to have grown weary and menacing of late.”

“Welcome to the club,” Teach grunts with undisguised contempt. John does not feel welcome at all.

He looks at Flint, waiting for a flicker of some similar emotion, but it isn’t there. He barely seems to be paying attention. If he is scornful and jealous somewhere within, he keeps it neatly locked away. John tells himself he appreciates the restraint, but in truth he had been eager to receive the torrent, and to quell it. He has speeches planned.

“Dissecting this facet of our attack is pointless,” Madi interrupts, as Rackham opens his mouth, no doubt to hammer into the subject from a few more extraneous angles. “It is only one facet, and it is done. You cannot write Long John Silver out of this war. He is already deep in it, and he is turning men’s minds. He is a champion to rally behind, but The Maroon Council promises stability to those who are not convinced that it is in their interest to side with a one-legged madman.” She looks to John without apology. “This name suggests a strong and united front.”

Rackham inhales shrilly through his nose. “You mean it makes us sound as if we have our shit rather more together than we actually do.”

Madi tilts her head. “In essence.”

“Captain,” John says, voice mild, so mild it might betray the intensity of his interest, “your thoughts?” 

Flint's eyes meet his directly for the first time all night and it is almost too gratifying. John’s remaining knee bounces unconsciously.

Flattening his hands upon the tabletop, Flint shifts his attention from John to Madi beside him, continuing around the circle until they have all engaged with his silence individually. “I think,” he says at last, “that if we are to be smart, we should stop asking ourselves whether or not Woodes Rogers fears us, and start asking whether or not Eleanor Guthrie does. She is where England’s greatest tactical advantage lies. If we are to lose this war, it will most likely be because of her.”

That’s not at all what John had expected or cared to hear. Madi, however, listens with firm attention.

“How do you suggest that we prevent such an outcome?” she asks. 

“Easy.” Teach downs his glass of rum and jostles the notes set before him out of place as he reaches to pour himself another. “Kill her.”

“Maybe,” Flint says, but John knows him well enough to be able to see when he has set himself to an idea. “Better yet, recruit her.”

 

—

 

Teach breaks a bottle of rum over the back of Flint’s chair and the Maroon Council adjourns for the evening. Talk spills across the island, whispers of what was said building upon one another in retelling after retelling until one or both of them come out of the story dead, dying, or otherwise maimed. John can hear Rackham’s nasal pacifications of Teach through the trees as he follows Flint’s trail back to his room, which is less a room in truth and more an interpretation of one, carved from the trunks of the surrounding trees and canopied by wide yellow leaves. Here privacy is a pretension. John knocks on a branch before entering. 

Flint is unscathed, but annoyed. When he see John he simply rolls his eyes and gestures to a sturdy chair carved in the likeness of a snake by one of the Maroon craftsmen.

“You can’t really have expected that to go over well,” John says as he sits. “Eleanor Guthrie executed Charles Vane.”

He watches the muscles in Flint’s jaw clench, watches how he forces them to relax so that he can feign indifference in his tone. “Vane killed her father. I wouldn’t call her actions anymore morally impermissible than the average.”

“That’s not the point. Teach’s allegiance is already growing tenuous. Suggestions like that could,”— 

“Eight years ago,” Flint says, cutting him off without speaking louder or faster, but with such unhurried conviction that John can find no way around him, “Eleanor drove Teach from Nassau when she was hardly more than a girl. History suggests that she is the more valuable ally of the two.” 

“Except that she’s helping to lead the war against us. Other than that, she’d make a fine ally, you’re correct.” John is disagreeing not because he thinks Flint’s idea is without merit, but because it is his job to object, to examine. He is Flint’s check.

In the distance, Teach can be heard telling Jack Rackham to go fuck himself and his table. 

“If I didn’t think her mind could be changed,” Flint says, earnest and awake, looking at John the way he only looks at John, “I wouldn’t have suggested it. I know Eleanor. She knows me. My plan will work.”

The problem is that John truly believes him.

Over the course of their association, he has come to realize that Flint does not obscure or distort the truth, but create it. What he says becomes so, because he is believed. For some time, it has been John’s job to make sure that happens, to speak his words in a more pleasant voice. The taste of them should have made them hollow, not more whole. He is already crafting strategies for communicating the reclamation of Eleanor Guthrie in such a way as to make it more palatable to the men. He is already adopting Flint’s truth as his own.

He nods shortly, standing from his chair, taken with the urge to parse through this line of thought on his own, without the weight of Flint’s expectance on it. “Let me discuss it with Madi,” he says, by way of excuse, and Flint’s brow twitches slightly but he exhibits no surprise. He is a perceptive man. He must know what she has become to John.

“First,” Flint says, as John makes to duck past the sheet that serves as a door, “why don’t you ask me what you really came here to ask.”

John stills, the muscles of his shoulder stiffening halfway through a movement. He wets his lips, and turns slowly. The invitation does not diminish the difficulty of the question, but it does make it impossible for him to avoid asking it without admitting to fears that he would rather leave unscrutinized. 

He gives Flint a tight smile and a nod of acquiescence, and says, “Alright. You haven’t said what it is that you think of Long John Silver.”

Flint doesn’t blink, doesn’t feign surprise. “I have. I told Billy that it was commendable work.”

John takes a step toward him, gaining momentum. “I’m not talking about Billy’s talent for penning threatening letters. I’m asking if you’re offended that it wasn’t your name that was used.”

“Why would I be?” Flint sounds less like he is genuinely asking the question and more like he is prodding John for sore spots, searching out where his resentment lies.

John frowns, and gives nothing away. “I know your pride.”

Flint’s eyebrows rise and he breathes a short laugh out through his nose. “And what of it? Would you like me to be jealous? Would you like me to feel threatened by you and your story?” He looks up at John with such matter-of-fact condescension. “Men fear you out there, it’s true. Men fear you because it has been designed to be so. Your name was written into legend by someone else’s hand.” 

He stands, unhurriedly, and John clenches his jaw, trying to think of a fucking thing to say to that. Flint has two glasses in his room, and two glasses only. He pours them each a drink, the movements of his hands so controlled. John has seen those hands shake, has seen him weak with rage and with misery. He tries to access those memories as Flint hands him one cup and empties the other in one slow swallow.

“Men like myself,” he continues, setting his glass upon the table with a hollow clink, “like Edward Teach, like Charles Vane—we had no such assistance. We made our names for ourselves, and they spread across oceans. Why would I resent Long John Silver when he is so useful to my cause? He is a fiction. He is not you.”

He says it like he wants to make sure that John knows it, and John cannot suppress the insult that rises in him. Blood flows hot up the back of his neck, around his skull, and into his temples. 

“You don’t think me capable of tying nooses?” he asks, forcing his voice level.

Flint’s lips twitch at their corner. “I have known you to stomp through a man’s head on a false leg. I have little doubt as to what you’re capable of.” He sounds almost fond, but his fondness reeks of belittlement. 

John takes slow steps forward. “I think you do. I think you doubt me.”

The space between them disappears and Flint lets it, holding his ground, immovable, and John has no choice but to commit to his advance and continue. He gets so close that he can feel Flint’s breath on his face, so close that it’s a threat, a violation. He grits his jaw and thinks about how much force it would take to defeat Flint hand-to-hand, how much effort. He remembers the bloody mess that had once been Singleton’s face, and Flint’s hands, his chin, his bright mad eyes and the fear that they had filled John with. That fear still resides within him, but it has changed shape, sunk deeper and grown fuller. The thing he is afraid of is not Flint’s strength or his blood thirst. The thing he is afraid of has no name. It shivers and snarls when Flint looks down at him, eyes hard, asking him to step away, to let this be. 

John does not let this be. “You still don’t think that I’m on your level, do you?” he says. “How much more proof do you need?”

Flint frowns, stiff and unbending, and leans down just a tad so that he is looking John directly in his eyes. If he’s uncomfortable with their proximity, he doesn’t let it show. 

“Remember when you told me,” he grits slowly, each word weighted with emphasis, “that you had discovered the pleasure of being both loved and feared? Is that what you would like from me? It is not enough that you have earned my respect, my friendship. You would now like for me to be frightened of you as well?” His nostrils flare, his rage is quiet. “I am not one of your men.”

John can feel the words on his face and he bears them without flinching, says only, “And I am not one of yours.”

Flint’s brow twitches, and he moves a hair closer, disgustingly close, warm and sour with the smell of whiskey, a solid and immovable blockade between John and what he wants. And he says to him, of all the unbearable things, “Isn’t that exactly what you are?” 

John shoves him. He has no intent towards violence just as he’d had no interest in an argument, but here they are, here he is, backing Flint up into the thatched wall and holding him by the collar of his shirt, breath coming too fast, fuming with anger to burn away the shame, the indignity of being talked down to by this—this—a man so far beneath him, so far beneath all of them, this miserable wreck of a man who still dares to think that he holds such power of John, when John—

John has never seen Flint look as he does now, not this close up. Not panicked, not quite, but ardently and inarguably uncomfortable, eyes wide, body still, pressing as far from John as he can get. The laughable notion that Flint fears him occurs to John for one thrilling moment before he sets himself right, abandons his egocentric fantasies. Flint is clearly afraid of something, however, and John grips the fabric of his shirt harder and leans in closer just to get a better look at what that is.

Flint grits his jaw, breathing out hard through his teeth, and John expects with each passing moment to be battered away, but isn’t. They stare at each other in the dark, unmoving but for the shake of clenched muscles, and in this moment John cannot escape the invasive thought, for no reason that he would like to critically examine, of Thomas Hamilton.

Of Thomas Hamilton just this close to Flint, and the anger that he would not be greeted with, not at all, but how welcome he would be. 

John looks at Flint’s lips. He doesn’t intend to, but once the thought is in him it won’t go away, and he wonders if he is not welcome, too. He hasn’t been shoved away. Flint might beat him to a mess at any moment, and doesn’t, and John supposes the only logical way to take that is to lean in, and— 

He feels the sharp intake of breath against his own lips, closes the gap and pushes in with the force of all of his resentment, his demands, his hunger for recognition. For Flint to recognize him as the equal that he is, instead of something lesser, something benign. He kisses him with rage, fingers digging deep into the fabric of his shirt, crawling up his shoulders, grabbing him and forcing him to feel what John is capable of, the power that he has, the force within him, the— 

The floor comes up sharply behind him and slams into his back. Above him, breath coming heavy and mouth curled in an open sneer, Flint stares down at him like he’s going to fucking kill him.

Silver feels his face flood with blood as the weight of his miscalculation settles on him, his chest still heaving, heart beating fast, skin warm and cock—well. He’s not wholly flaccid. He doesn’t know what had possessed him to think that had been a good idea, that it would be met with anything but outrage and violence. Except that—he’d seen it in Flint’s face, felt it in the momentary give of his body. His advances had not been totally unwanted. Perhaps unacceptable, but not unwanted.

That must make Flint more furious than anything: the embarrassment, the weakness. 

Though, he doesn’t seem so embarrassed or weak when he stands over John and looks down at him with visceral disgust. “If you ever,” he says, “try anything like that again,”—

“You’ll kill me?” John asks, trying to laugh off his part in this, to minimize the gravity of it. “Surely I’ve done worse things to you in the past.”

Flint’s jaw clenches, the veins in his neck straining. He looks as if it’s taking all of his strength not to scream his lungs empty. He shakes his head, lip curling, and looks away as if in disgust. “I cannot,” he starts, then stops, swallows, retries. “I told you about Thomas in confidence. Because I trusted you.”

John’s stomach drops. “I know,” he says, very softly.

“And yet now you throw it back in my face.” 

“I wasn’t,”— 

“Please,” Flint grits, with such control that he looks to be shaking within his skin, “don’t pretend, Mr. Silver, that that was anything more than a power move. A scare tactic. You cannot get under my skin that way. Don’t suppose for a moment that you can.”

John wants to argue, but finds he has nothing to say. Isn’t Flint right? Isn’t that exactly what it was? 

Flint sighs, turns his back to John, and pours himself another drink. “For whatever reason,” he says, without looking back, “it seems that you have taken a great interest in doing me harm.” 

John swallows, and says, without fully meaning it, “I have no interest in it. I fear somehow that I will be your end, that’s what I told you, and that’s the truth.” 

“Don’t mistake your own intentions.” Flint takes slow steps back to his chair and retakes his seat, while John remains on the floor, leaned upon his elbows. “If the worry plagues you, it’s because you know on some level that it’s what you want.” He takes a long sip. “You may not take pride in your baser desires, not all men do, but don’t deny them. Not to yourself, and not to me.”

“And what of your baser desires?” John asks, and watches Flint’s eyes widen a little, his back stiffen, the anger spike so monumentally that John has to clarify quickly. “I don’t mean—I mean vengeance. It may power you, but it doesn’t own you. It is not all that you are.” He sits up more fully, feeling at last as if he can move without having it taken as a threat. “I may wish to usurp you, it’s true, but only on the lowest and most animal level. I have enough sense in me to see that I would be far worse off were you no longer around.” He dares an expression of tenderness. “I like having you around.”

Flint does not mirror his expression. “It’s interesting that you believe that my continued existence depends solely on your whim, especially when we both know that the opposite is the case.”

John holds his fear still, and forces a smile. His lips still sting. “Good thing that you like having me around, too.”

Flint neither argues nor agrees. He finishes his drink in silence, and then tells John to get out.

 

—

 

Madi asks nothing of him. Her hands are careful with his wound, her lips sure against his. She pulls long silences out of him and puts longer silences back in. They don’t fuck to fall in love, they fuck to build bridges and to hold bridges steady. He imagines that she feels something for him, but she keeps it held still inside her, and he doesn’t ask to touch it.

“What did he do to you?” she asks, seeing the look on his face when he slips into her chambers.

“Nothing. He did nothing.” He knows she doesn’t believe him, and as he sits to remove his false leg, he mumbles, “We had an argument of sorts. Nothing unusual.”

She tilts her head. She knows more than she bothers to let on. “Did you win?”

John gives her a pained smile. He still feels the pressure on his hands, the unyielding force that was Flint’s body against his. He says, “There is no winning with him.” 

 

—

 

The first step toward Eleanor Guthrie is a step through Edward Teach. Flint approaches peace like he approaches war: unflinching, ready to bleed.

The table is round, there is no way for any two parties to sit opposite each other, but today’s council still manages to center on the diagonal line between Flint’s frown and Teach’s snarl. Civility comes slowly, and compromise ever slower.

“The only reason that I returned to Nassau, the only reason why I joined your shitty war effort in the first place, was to have Eleanor Guthrie’s head. Now you’re telling me that not only should I surrender that, but also plead with the bitch to join us?” Flecks of spit fly from Teach’s mouth and land upon the surface of the table. John watches Madi frown at them, fists clenched in her lap.

“Does our plan involve pleading, Captain Flint?” Rackham asks, without looking away from Teach.

“It does not.” 

“As I thought. Neither you nor anyone will be required, or for that matter allowed, to plead with Miss Guthrie for anything. As long as we have the Urca gold, we have the advantage, and we can make our demands as we please. Though we can win this war without her, I think everyone in this room agrees that Miss Guthrie’s compliance will double our advantage, while unalterably diminishing England’s. She is their cache, so to speak.” Rackham glances about the table. “Of knowledge.”

“So, why again can’t we kill her?” Bonny asks.

John pinches the bridge of his nose. He’d said not to bring her into the council, but Rackham had insisted that since she would be playing the largest active role in the acquisition of Eleanor Guthrie, she ought to be included. He’s paused, pursing his lips, appearing to reconsider the decision.

“Your woman sees sense,” Teach says.

“No,” Rackham says, throwing a pointed look over his shoulder, “she just also happens to loathe Miss Guthrie. In fact, I don’t think there’s a person among us who thinks of the woman fondly, but,”—

“I,” Flint interrupts, apparently without a proper understanding of what the word ‘diplomacy’ means, “have nothing but respect for Eleanor and her position.” He stares directly at Teach while he speaks. “She is trying to achieve the Nassau that she and I agreed to pursue not so many months ago, before her capture and before Charlestown. The reason that I abandoned that plan was because I realized that I could never make peace with England when it had taken so much from me. I imagine that’s exactly how she feels about Nassau.”

John watches Teach’s face contort, and asks, conversationally, “So, why would she be anymore willing to reconsider than you are?” He is playing devil’s advocate in order to ensure that the conversation goes in the direction that it needs to and not, he will assure anyone who might ask, because it brings him pleasure to challenge Flint.

If Flint cares for the distinction, he doesn’t let on.

He says, without looking at John, but keeping his eyes all the time on Teach, “Because there are still people on Nassau for whom she cares. It is her home. She wants it conquered, true, but if she cannot conquer it, if she realizes that we will win and that she will be returned to England like a piece of cargo, she will have cause to join us. What does she have there?” He looks to Rackham, who’s mouth is peeling open, as it is wont to do. “Woodes Rogers?” Flint says for him. “And his wife Sarah Rogers, and their beautiful English children?” He shakes his head. “There is no place for her there.” 

“There is no place for her here,” Teach snaps, slamming his hand down hard enough upon the table to shake every glass. “Even the suggestion that I could be in that woman’s presence without killing her is an insult.”

Flint nods. “You desire vengeance?”

“I demand vengeance.”

“Then how can you blame Eleanor for doing the same. Vane killed her father. How would you have had her react?“ 

Bonny’s nostrils flare. Her rage is obvious, but she holds her tongue. Beside her, Rackham hardly appears anymore pleased, digging his pen through the stack of papers in front of him and into the wood of the desk. 

“As far as Charles told it,” Teach says, “she had little and less to be sore about. Richard Guthrie never did anything good for anyone but himself, least of all his daughter.” 

“I don’t disagree,” Flint says. “But what did Charles Vane ever do for you? Betray you not once, but twice. And yet you have forgiven him enough to desire to visit revenge upon his killer. Might you accept that the allowances that you would make for him be made for Eleanor?”

It takes immense control for John not to wince. This is the diciest part, the greatest insult. It’s dangerous, but Flint looks utterly unfazed, expression solemn and matter-of-fact. John looks at him for too long, or perhaps looks at him just as long as he ever would, but feels stranger about it now.

Teach says, obviously suffering in some silent and wildly controlled way, “If Charles were still alive, I’d kill him, too.” 

“No, you wouldn’t,” Rackham says, before Flint has a chance to respond. “I wouldn’t let you, Anne wouldn’t let you, and we wouldn’t forgive you if you succeeded, just as we refuse to forgive Miss Guthrie. We’re not going to offer her a pardon,” he says, turning to face Flint now, “we’re going to offer her a bargain.” 

Flint nods. “And, furthermore, she’s going to take it.”

Keeping her silence, Madi nods, too. Last John had spoken to her, she had been heavy with reservations regarding this plan, and still she wears the quirk upon her brow which suggests that she is giving the matter vigorous consideration, but John can tell that she is convinced. He knows her.

He knows Flint, too. He knows what he can do to a crowd. Hell, it’s John’s job to help him do it. And yet, he feels estranged by this moment, by the decisive expressions worn on each face and how Flint meets them all, offers them reason, offers them exchange—all, it seems, except for John.

Flint hasn’t looked at him all day.

 

—

 

Finding Flint alone is easy, it’s keeping his company that’s the hard part. John would like to be all subtlety and sly rhetoric, but at the look Flint gives him, up from under his eyelids, annoyed at the sight of him and braced for displeasure, John decides not to waste his tact. 

He comes to stand beside him on the balcony, leaving a shoulders-width of space between them and says, “I can’t help feeling as if I’ve upset you.”

“Yes,” Flint says, without looking up, “it’s typical that you would assume that my mood is wholly caused by you and not, in fact, the difficult and time-consuming intricacies of waging a war.”

John takes no offense. “I didn’t say wholly.” He watches Flint and Flint watches the forest. The tree-tops rustle with a coastal wind that rises off the shore, dulling out the sun as it hits its peak in the sky. He tries to look as honest as he can. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable because of what I did.”

Flint stiffens and John enjoys it. He would like to have pure intentions, and in a world where he could feel ardent concern and regret for a thoughtless action, he might live peaceably among better men, but here, in this one, as the person that he is, he has found a way to get his finger in the wound. He cannot help but twist. 

Flint says, “It’s forgotten already,” but he does not sound committed to that pretension.

“Is it? Should it be? Maybe we should discuss,”— 

“I’m busy, Silver.” Flint gives him a look that communicates his full understanding of what John is trying to do, and his disinterest in it. He pushes himself up from the rail. “If and when you want to talk about the war, I’ll be eager to listen.”

“This is about the war,” John says to his retreating back. “You and I are the war.” 

If Flint hears him, he gives no indication, just walks at a steady pace out from the shelter of the canopy and disappears between the wide trunks of the trees.

 

—

 

The quickest route to Eleanor Guthrie, it is universally agreed, is through her only remaining ally in Nassau who is not an English-appointed governor whom they are all trying to overthrow, which leaves, as Bonny so tactfully grunts: 

“Max.” 

“No harm will come to her,” John assures her as they weigh the anchor of _The Walrus_ for the first time in a month, the hot smell of the sea rolling over them in salty gusts, the strands of their hair beating against their cheeks. They will reach New Providence within the week, if the wind stays with them. 

“You bet your arse it fucking won’t,” Bonny snaps from under the brim of her hat. “Anything happens to her, I’ll kill you myself, bollocks to the alliance.”

John nods with practiced solemnity. “Bollocks indeed, but I don’t think it will come to that. However, if it does,”—John strains to maintain the credibility of his expression—“I would just like to warn you that should any harm come to _me_ , Captain Flint will be forced to take revenge upon _you_.” 

From a few paces away, spyglass held fast to his eye, Flint says, “No, I won’t.”

“He’s just being coy,” John says, letting a smile slip into his eyes.

Bonny doesn’t laugh, but neither does she scowl, and that is progress. Alliances are formed by mutual necessity, but they are kept through rapport, something to fall back on once needs change. The task she has been set to allows ample opportunity for her to betray them, but she is far less likely to do so if she actually likes them.

If John is good at anything, it’s making people like him. 

Flint has no interest in such a talent. He says, “You’ll eat with the men, sleep in their quarters, and do your equal share of the work. You are not a passenger aboard this ship, but a temporary member of her crew. Are these conditions acceptable to you?”

Bonny shrugs. “Wouldn’t expect nothin’ less. But Max, she’ll be a passenger, yeah?”

“Yes,” Flint says, “she will be a passenger.”

Bonny grunts her way out of the exchange, and John watches her go and decides he doesn’t see the appeal. For someone as florid, intense, and self-composed as Max to be so enamored with this charmless, ill-tempered brute of a girl makes little sense to him, but he lets it lie. The parts of him that had not understood emotion are dead. Emotion breeds within him constantly now, sharpening its knives. If he could shed it as he once had, he wouldn’t be here. He would be rich, and he would be alone.

“I like her,” Flint says.

John rolls his eyes, and feels warmth where it isn’t wanted. “Of course you do.”

The conversation could flow from there, but it doesn’t. Flint withdraws, catching DeGroot in passing and engaging him on the subject of their correspondence with Billy—something that this venture is dependent upon and, to Flint’s credit, a passable excuse—which leaves John alone, leant against the rail, watching his back and wondering just how much longer he will have to pay for his one small trespass.

To think that somewhere not far from here Long John Silver is hanging traitors by the neck and setting Englishmen checking over their shoulders while he, the namesake, stands perfectly still, staring at the back of James Flint’s head and trying not to feel anything specific.

 

— 

 

It builds. 

The sound of the waves lapping against the side of the hull fills a silence in John that he hadn’t even noticed was there. Flint slots himself back into his place against the horizon as if he had never left. They burn for the first few days, and brown after that, relearning their paths across the deck, opening up old blisters on their palms. The sea takes them back without question, and John has the good sense not to question that. If this is his home now, it can go unsaid.

Bonny keeps to herself, but she can climb the rigging faster than most of the men, and she blacks Dooley’s eye on the second night for an offhand comment about, “the whore-queen,” so she earns her place quicker than most. Flint is resolute and quiet when he is in attendance, and otherwise absent, behind the locked door of his cabin where John had once been a much sought-after guest. He knows he is being punished, and he takes his lashings with a grin. It doesn’t really matter if it hurts or not. What matters is the grin.

He makes speeches, the severity of his instruction always counterbalanced by the fondness in his tone, drawing the men in and then shooing them out again with his chant on their lips. Few of them realize that they are only his secondary audience. He is speaking to Flint even when Flint is the only one who isn’t listening. The less Flint listens, the louder John speaks. 

It keeps on building.

“Day after next you’ll win back your lost love. Excited?” he asks Bonny when they’re two nights out from the coast of Nassau. The stars jitter above them as if suspended on strings. 

She says, “Don’t talk to me,” but John stands there long enough, looking sure enough, that eventually she glances up from under the lank piece of hair that she wears across her face and mumbles, “’S not for sure, anyway. Might be she won’t want to be won. Might be she’s happy where she is.”

“She may well be,” John tells her, “but you’ve got to convince her that she’d be better off coming with you.”

Bonny sneers. “I don’t have to do shit.”

“We’re going to raze her new kingdom to the ground. Would you rather that she burned with it?” 

“It’s her choice.” Bonny shrugs. “All I’m doing is offering her the choice." 

John takes several steps closer to her. The moonlight makes shapes that shift and shiver upon the water, and from belowdecks the clatter of men slamming their cups together rises. “Heartfelt, I’m sure, but dangerous. People too often make the wrong choices.”

“Yeah,” Bonny says doubtfully, “and what would you do, if she was someone you loved? Just throw her over your shoulder and take her away with you, no matter what she wanted?”

“Absolutely,” John says. “We are pirates, after all.”

He’s lying, of course. He couldn’t lift the thing he wants. He can hardly even touch it. 

It will build until it boils. 

 

—

 

Flint has troubled him for a long time, in innumerable ways, but this has never before been one of them. John has shared his demons, has grabbed them, leashed them, talked sense to them. John has seen his sins and, willingly or not, blessed every one. He’d thought that he was as deep in Flint as he could possibly get, but he sees now, through a lens of mingled frustration and rum, thank you very much Mr. Joji, that he had been thinking far too small. 

At midnight, Billy had arrived alone, as proposed, in a rowboat to ferry Bonny to Nassau proper. The agreement is that she will return within twenty-four hours accompanied by Max, if all goes according to plan, or without, if it does not. Should she remain absent after the proposed time, she will be presumed dead or otherwise compromised, and _The Walrus_ will leave her in its dust. To soften the blow of this stricture, they’d put up a toast in honor of her mission as she’d been climbing down the side of the hull, and though she hadn’t joined in, John had seen the small quirk of her lip in the slant of light that had fallen across her face from Billy’s lamp.

“Pour one out for me!” he’d called up, before taking up the oars again and disappearing into the moonless night.

Flint does not attend the festivities, so John gets smashing drunk in his honor. There’s nothing else to do for the next day, and besides, it endears the men to him, to see him among them, to see his humanity. That is Flint’s most grievous mistake. To hide all weakness is to make oneself inaccessible, inconceivable, and strange. He may terrify them, but they _love_ John. They love him. 

John loves—more things than he had. 

His knock is sloppy against Flint’s door, and he tries to sober up all at once, tries to set himself right so as not get caught up in—what, exactly? It’s a power game. Flint has all the power now, after that kiss, and John wants it back. The best thing to do is take it. He knocks again when the answer comes too slow, but gets caught up in the action and keeps on swinging his fist even when the hinges squeak and the wood falls away. His hand drops uselessly through the open air, and he swallows down his surprise.

From the other side of the door, Flint’s expression flickers from blank, to annoyed, to even blanker. “Silver,” he says. 

“Evening, Captain.” In his own voice, John hears a drunk’s impression of sobriety. “Might I come in?” 

Flint looks him up and down, brow twitching. “I’m busy.”

“No, you’re not. You’re lying, because you want to avoid me.”

Something he should have been able to say in the last week without drink to steer him along, but speaking plainly is not John’s strong suit. He only acknowledges certain truths as a way to obscure others, deeper and thicker ones which live below the mind, within the strange chemistry of the body. 

After a moment of strained silence, broken only by the distant roar of the night’s festivities—men with bottles turning their trepidation to revelry by way of bawdy musical interlude—Flint gives. He must know that he cannot hide in his bunk for the rest of the war, and that to turn from John’s input is as good as muting a facet of his own mind.

“Can you blame me?” he says, somewhat incautiously, as he steps aside.

John looks at him benignly as he enters the room. “I can see how you might have taken insult from the situation, but I want you to know that I didn’t intend anything of the sort.”

Flint appears unconvinced, and unwilling to be made so. “And what did you intend?”

John grins, arches his shoulders backwards, minutely presses his hips forward—this, too, is a form of war—and says, “I’m a simple man of simple needs.”

The mood sours. “We both know,” Flint says slowly, “that you are anything but a simple man.”

John likes to hear that. It thrills him into taking slow steps forward, gaining on Flint inch by inch, who simply stands there, rigid and unamused, as the space between them shrinks. The room rolls about them, the lapping of the sea shifting their stances minutely from moment to moment. Flint is proud and tall and when John gets close enough, he has to bend his neck to look at him. 

This is their hierarchy: Flint is king and John is kingsman. Billy is trying to make a revolution out of him, but John is apart from it, a lone swaying figure against a backdrop of the sea, with a hand that reaches out to touch— 

“Don’t,” Flint says. His breathing is constrained, his face blank. “Once is an honest miscalculation. Twice is an attack.” 

John’s fingers still halfway between them, brows rising. “An attack?”

“On our partnership.” Flint speaks deliberately, voice low, whispery like it is on late nights, in close quarters. “On my trust in you.”

“Obviously you don’t have any trust in me.” John lets his hand drop, opens his mouth again, but is too swamped with drink to interpret and organize the particulars of what he is feeling.

Flint rolls his eyes. “You depend upon me, so I am able to, without much discomfort, depend upon you. But if you try to alter the state of things, to sway the axis of power in your own favor,”—

“That’s the only possible reason that you can think of that I would,”—

“Silver.”

Flint’s voice is monotone, his eyes unfocused, fingers twitching at his side. It is not a lack of feeling, but a suppression. He is jittering beneath his skin. John watches him, and swallows. His gut rolls with something that is at once sordid and devout, and he takes a step forward. 

The shape of Flint winces as the heat of him grows. John doesn’t touch him, doesn’t make any advance that can be denied, but stares him down with hazy eyes and watches the clench of his jaw, the strain of it expanding down the line of his neck, into the set of his shoulders. He thinks of his flesh, all that vicious strength and what it compensates for. John wants to see the thing beneath it. 

He tilts his face upwards so that they’re eye-level, mouth level, and says, “I understand that you interpret ill intention. But what if you didn’t?” Flint must feel his breath on his skin. “What if I just wanted to because I wanted to.”

“I wouldn’t believe you.” Quick response, bitten out with pre-rehearsed surety.

John’s scoff is hoarse and whiskey flavored. “Why is it so hard to believe? That I might”—he swallows down the rest of that thought, reshapes it. “We’re very close, Captain. I know you very, _very_ well.”

“You don’t know half of what you don’t know.”

Flint’s voice is strained, but John is just drunk enough to interpret an invitation to strain it further.

“I know about Thomas,” he says, and the name comes easily, as if it’s any word. “Your deepest, most well-guarded secret. You trusted me with that, yet you can’t trust me with this?” 

He’s knocking on doors that don’t open. His fist will weigh heavy tomorrow, but in this moment he wonders that he hasn’t said this before, that they haven’t spoken of this in detail, when it hangs, only partly conceived, at the edges of their every interaction, like fog misting the corners of a pane of glass.

Flint doesn’t visibly react, but something contorts in the outline of him. “Thomas was not an invitation.” He speaks slowly and in simple structures, voice clenched. “Thomas was not a revelation of an interest that you could exploit. You cannot exploit this. You cannot touch this.” 

That rends something open inside John, and it’s not his heart. The affection he feels for Flint is compounded by a sense of ownership—a mutual ownership, perhaps otherwise conceived as ‘partnership’—and that arrangement doesn’t allow for untouchable places. John wants to pull him out of his clothes and shake him.

A bluff will do the job better:

“Obviously I can.” John takes the last step, closing the sliver of space between them, and watches the grit in Flint’s eyes try to hold him back. “Obviously, if you’re so threatened by the very thought, then I have already touched it.” He takes his chances and lays his palm flat across Flint’s collar bone, the tips of his fingers brushing the line of his throat. “I already have the power that you’re so afraid to give me.”

His voice is low and gruff. This would be a seduction if it wasn’t such a folly.

Flint looks down at his hand, then up at his face, and raises his brows, as if confirming that this is a tactic that John has honestly committed to. When John doesn’t make a move to withdraw, he quirks the corner of his lips, and John experiences a brief belief that they have come to a mutual understanding, right before Flint hauls off and punches him in the face.

Shatter sharp, bone against flesh against teeth, and the hot copper taste of blood. John stumbles back into Flint’s cot and clutches his nose. “Holy shit,” he laughs, because he’s drunk, sloppy, and slightly floored. Used to be he couldn’t stand a single moment of pain, but times have changed. Used to be he had two legs and no obsessions.

“Tell me again,” Flint says, conversationally, “about the power you hold over me.” 

Muffled sounds of distant merriment flow from underneath the door. The ceiling does tricks above them, spinning itself dizzy, and John leans back on his elbows and says, sniffing, “Well, I was aiming to get in your bed, and here I am, so,”—Flint grabs him right on cue, interrupting a sentence that John’s blurry wit hadn’t come up with an end to. He pulls him up by the fabric of his shirt, lip curling with contempt.

“Going to beat me until my pretty face doesn’t tempt you anymore?” John titters, batting his eyelashes mockingly. 

Flint spits, “If you think your drunken slavering is at all tempting to me,”—and John takes his moment of distraction to kick him in his knee.

Flint stumbles, unprepared for retaliation, and knocks sideways into the bedpost, grabbing John as he falls and pulling them both into a thudding scuffle on the floor. John’s already blurry vision streaks, candlelight glinting yellow against an indistinct background, but he manages to land on top, positioning himself diagonally across Flint’s body and pinning him at the hips. Without thinking of his own strength or how to control it, he hits, fist loose and uncalculated. He knocks the corner of Flint’s mouth, the dip of his cheek between his teeth, and thrills at the grunt of pain he receives for his trouble.

They have never scrapped like this. They have never even really fought each other. John’s nose pulses with pain but something hungry inside of him just gets hungrier.

This is no duel, and there are no laws of sport. Flint shoves him up by his chin, forcing the angle of his neck so brutally that John has to rend him off by his elbows, dispelling him but unable to pin his arms. He may have landed the upper hand, but John is far outranked by Flint’s strength and experience. He has less a hope of winning this fight and more an earnest lack of idea of what he is going to do or say when it ends. He knows, in a sober pocket of his addled mind, that this is not what he’d wanted. 

It’s still as close as he’s been able to get.

Flint grabs him by his hair, yanking him forward, so John head-butts him, but the impact has the backhanded effect of dizzying them both, and before John can get a hold on his equilibrium, Flint leans up and kisses him.

Wet, hot, and intrusive, something John hadn’t been prepared for and has no defense against. Flint’s fingers tighten in the roots of his hair and John slackens atop him, leaning down to make it easier, and it comes so easy. His gut feels warm and his hands catch Flint by the jaw, pulling him in, breathing hard against his mouth and grinding down against the plane of his abdomen, as he thinks about how right he was, how correct this is. Flint needs him to fill the space that every tragedy has left. Flint needs him to hold him down and— 

He flips John onto his back, plants his knees on either side of his ribs, and shoves him flat to the floor with a palm against his forehead. The switch is so abrupt that it leaves him jittering, frowning up at the sterility of Flint’s expression. He’d been so willing and warm a moment ago, but now he’s the cold conquerer that he likes to pretend he is, the dread Captain Flint in the flesh. Joke’s on him, because John can feel the flesh where it presses against his trousers and into John’s sternum.

John’s lips quirk as he glances down at it.

Flint rolls his eyes and, with a grunt, pushes himself to his feet and staggers over to his desk to pour himself a drink. He doesn’t offer John one. 

Pushing himself up on his elbows and watching Flint shuffle about in all his deflated rage, John says, rather altruistically, “I’ll suck your cock.” 

Flint downs his glass and blinks. “I’m leaving.”

“This is your room.”

“Keep it.”’

There is no finality in the click of the door shut behind him, nor in the look he gives John before he leaves, only the suggestion that when they next meet and John has sobered up enough, there will something to pay that is similar in shape and constitution to hell.

John stands slowly, waiting for he knows not what. When nothing happens, he takes a swig from the bottle that Flint had left on the desk and, taking his parting words at face value, tugs off his boots and crawls into Flint’s bed to sleep the whole mess off.

 

—

 

The pounding in John’s head has a close contender in the throbbing of his nose, and he wakes feeling both before thought forms, like a punishment that he can’t remember why he deserves. It comes back in grand, looping waves of humiliation, centering around the feeling of Flint’s body against his and stretching backwards and forwards from there to account for the context. He buries his head beneath the warmest pillow and thinks of nothing but getting back to sleep, and rescheduling the consequences of his actions to a time when he is more physically capable of dealing with them. Or, to be frank, sitting up.

It’s then that he hears the shuffle of papers, and realizes with a gut-dropping moment of panic, that he is not alone. 

“There’s a glass of water on the night stand,” Flint says, from across the room, in an uninvested voice. “Don’t spill it.” 

John sits up and squints at him. He tries to speak, coughs, finds the water in question and downs half the glass, and then tries again. “Your bedside manner is impeccable, Captain.” Flint glances up from his desk for only a moment, communicating in a single look that John’s forced nonchalance is in no way convincing. John drinks the other half of the water. “Have I slept all day?”

Flint shakes his head. “It’s not yet noon. I need some input regarding my pitch to Madame Max, and I assumed that you wouldn’t want to pass up a chance to remind me why it is that I consider you more of an asset to this crew than a liability.” 

John licks his dry lips, and nods. He deserves that. Moving to sit on the edge of the cot, he says, “I suppose I made rather an arse of myself last night.”

“You’ll make a bigger arse of yourself if, in the light of day, you pretend that you don’t remember any of it, or didn’t mean it.” 

John blinks, surprised by Flint’s frankness. “I wasn’t going to.” He dares a small smile. “I take nothing back, not even the unscrupulous touching.”

“Good,” Flint says. Then, perhaps realizing how that sounds, adds, “A man should own his sins.”

John thinks that’s an interesting choice of words. Vainly attempting to shift scrutiny from himself, he asks, “Do you still see it as a sin?” 

For the first time since John has awoken, the scratch of Flint’s pen stops. He frowns. “That’s not what I meant. You know that. You know I don’t.”

John stands. He finds his feet shaky and the floor beneath them shakier, but he commits to the attempt once he begins it, and hobbles off balance to the visitor’s chair on the other side of Flint’s desk, taking it with heavy relief. This is the first time in a long time that he’s slept with his prosthetic on, and he makes a point of ignoring the seething pain in his stump.

“So, you’re saying that your decisive rejection of me has nothing to do with my being a man?” he asks Flint, at length.

Flint sets down his pen and looks at him, really looks at him, without strain or inherent denial. It feels like the first time that Flint is has actively engaged with John’s attraction to him as a fact of reality and not just an insult. He says, after a moment of thought, “If you were a woman, I believe you would have tried to seduce me from the first. That’s just the type of person you are. It was only when you discovered that, as a man, you might be able to gain some leverage from sex that you tried it.” 

John grits his teeth together, trying to rub away the wet sandy taste of his hangover. “You’re probably right. If I had known your inclinations from day one, I would have tried to exploit them. But,” he continues, with lessening apathy in his tone, “if you think nothing has changed between then and now,”—

“A lot has changed,” Flint agrees. “Back then you just wanted my gold. Now you want everything else, too.”

The cuts something in John that he hadn’t thought was cuttable, and when he opens his mouth he doesn’t know how to deny it. He closes it again, and swallows. Flint watches him across the desk, eyes level and free of condemnation.

John clears his throat. “Your pitch. To Max. What have you got so far?”

Flint settles back, disengaging from the very real thing that he’d had his fingers an inch from—John is equally as disappointed as he is relieved—and rattles off a rough outline. Even unpolished as it is, and grunted flatly, without the emotional slant that manipulates all listeners into zealous belief of his every word, it is brilliant. John is in awe of him. No matter how full his fear, or how telling his viciousness, John doesn’t think he will ever stop being in awe.

 

— 

 

Max is changed, although John couldn’t put a name to the difference. 

Hair windswept, chin pointed up, she greets him with, “It has been too long, John Silver,” and an expression that suggests that she will not suffer her play on words to be overlooked. Her handshake is firm and unflinching.

John nods. “I trust you took pains to make sure that you weren’t followed, and gave no indication of where you were going?” He glances over her shoulder at Billy who is, with Bonny’s tight-lipped assistance, shoring up the rowboat.

“Careful, as always,” Billy says.

Max’s lips twitch at their corner. “I gave Idelle, a girl in my employ, who is—if my understanding is correct—also in yours, instructions to tell all interested parties that I have taken a minor illness, and to reschedule my upcoming meetings.” 

John nods. “Good.”

“If I do not return within two days, however,” Max continues—clever girl, that hasn’t changed, “she has orders to go to Governor Rogers with information on where I have gone and who I have gone to see. Consider it, if you will, a form of insurance.” 

John stiffens. That’d hadn’t been part of the plan. He looks to Billy who, wide-eyed, appears not to have had any knowledge of this, either. He stills, hands upon the ropes.

“And here,” Flint says, lowly, stepping out of the shadows at just the right moment to say just the right thing, as if he had planned it all, line by line, “we were under the impression that Miss Bonny’s inexhaustible supply of death threats was your insurance.” 

Max settles her features into a look of serene confidence, a false bravado that almost passes for the real thing. “Captain Flint,” she greets, taking a step forward. “It is a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance under amiable circumstances.” 

Bonny moves to stand at her back, a quiet sentinel with unblinking eyes, and watches them muddle through every exhausting but necessary pleasantry. She knows what they all know: that this must go smoothly, even if no alliance comes of it. To parley with Max is more dangerous, perhaps, than even Eleanor herself, because if, through any eventuality, they end up killing her, then they will have to kill Bonny, too, which will make an enemy of Rackham, no matter the circumstances, and Rackham is the only thing still holding Teach’s wounded pride in check. The continued survival of The Maroon Council is dependent on the well-being of Max, and even if she doesn’t realize the extent of her worth, she must feel it in the deference being paid to her now. 

“Understand,” she tells Flint, “that I have agreed to meet with you not because I long for your victory, but because I have come to see it as the most likely outcome. This is a very dangerous kind of ally to have, however, and one who will abandon your cause for another should the odds seem to her to change. If you would like to be surer of my compliance in your scheme, you will have to convince me that your Nassau would be preferable to the Nassau of Governor Rogers.” 

Something sparks in Flint’s eyes. “I accept your challenge. We can discuss it over breakfast, after a night’s rest. The quartermaster’s cabin has been made ready for your use, and Billy will see to it that any other requirements you have are accommodated for, within reason. You are, of course, welcome to share your lodgings with whomsoever you wish.”

He shoots a quick but obvious glance at Bonny, who grunts, eyes flat, “What? You trying to be subtle or something?”

Billy turns his bark of laughter into and cough and Flint blinks twice, clearing his throat. “The men have been instructed to show Madame Max every measure of respect, but a guard on her door wouldn’t hurt.”

“Of course,” Max says. Her lips curl up at the edges as Bonny rolls her eyes, putting space between their bodies.

Flint, like the charmless old man that he often reveals himself to be, bids them each an awkward goodnight and turns on his heel without a glance at John. John, who has just realized why it is that he was allowed to sleep in Flint’s bed last night, gives Max a parting nod and limps after Flint. His hangover has faded, but there is still a dim pulse in his temples, and it heightens with every step.

“And where, exactly,” he says, catching up with him at the door to his room, “am I supposed to sleep?”

Hand on the knob, Flint doesn’t look up at him. “With the men.” 

“Wrong answer.” John’s palm lands flat against the wood of the door, holding it closed more with the defiance of his presence than bodily strength. His jaw still aches from last night. He tilts his head, curls his lips, looks Flint up and down and does not cower.

Flint could shove him aside, John would let him, but he doesn’t even try. With a long-suffering sigh, he says, “Where else would you have me put her?”

“I don’t know, how about in _your_ cabin, if you’re so eager to volunteer one.”

Flint’s lips twitch. “Then _I’d_ have to sleep with the men.”

“No,” John says, taking the arrangement of power—you go where I put you, you come when I call—and reordering it, “because I would let you bunk with me.”

The look he gives John misunderstands nothing. He is not shying now, but he is still not reciprocating, either. He flicks his eyes down John’s body, and he does so in such a way to be sure that he is noticed. “How charitable of you.”

John feels that he is too close to the thing he wants to have a good view of it. Is it power? Simple sexual gratification? Does one feed the other, and if so, in which direction? Flint’s acceptance of his advances does not transfer effortlessly into requital, but it is something, and it warms him, knotting things tighter, tugging them harder. He knows how to force his way in, but if Flint is inviting him, then who has got the weapon in which hand? Who’s conquering and who is conquered? Does there even need to be a conquerer?

“Do you want to go over the pitch again?” he asks, swallowing down all the other offers he could make.

 Flint nods with frowning gratitude, perhaps for the offer itself, perhaps because John has given him a permissible reason to ask him inside. “Yes.”

Yes, there needs to be a conquerer. Of course there does. The burning in John’s gut reminds him to make sure it is him.

 

—

 

John is on the bed and Flint is at his desk, his window, his desk again, barefoot and padding across the same space of floor as if determined to leave tracks. He makes speeches in halves, correcting himself, or dropping off mid-sentence without explanation to spend ten silent minutes frowning at the wall. He’s agonizing. John bounces his ideas back, offers critique and asks valid questions, but mostly he observes the agony.

“Are you ever going to rest?” he asks, when the wet gray dawn flickers at the edges of the horizon, threatening its approach. The look Flint flits between him and the space on the bed next to him makes John sit up and, with a roll of his eyes, offer, “I’ll sleep on the floor if that’s what it will take.”

Listen to him, edging gentility. 

Flint scoffs. “I’m not some quivering maid, frightened that you’ll rob me of my virtue.”

John grins. “Aren’t you?” 

He’s exhausted, warm, and still inside. Light creeps in over the sills of the windows, and Flint, with a committed lack of gravity, takes off his shirt and belt and looks John in the face as he crawls into bed beside him, letting his eyes fall shut at last. He gives a grunt of relief, and rolls over onto his stomach.

“Wake me in two hours time.” 

Something pulses in John’s stomach, something quieter than arousal, but fueled by the same veins. The line of Flint’s back, freckled and pale, and the slatted light shifting slowly over it. He takes a breath, says, “How can you be sure that I won’t fall asleep, too?”

Tilting his face sideways against the pillow, Flint squints at him, and says, through a yawn, “As if you’d pass up an opportunity to have me at your mercy.”

He’s playing with John, but it’s a kind game. On some level John wants to hold him down and fuck him into the mud, but on another, one that lives higher up on his spine, above the pull of his cock, he just wants to hold him still. There’s a perfect clarity in James Flint; not that he sees with it, but it exists between his shoulder blades, his jaw bone, his hands and feet. He hits and takes hits, and occasionally he subsides. Here he is beside John, without rage, or distraction. 

“If you didn’t want me here,” John murmurs, as much to himself as to Flint, “you’d just throw me out. You have that power.”

Flint’s eyes focus, just slightly. “I have that power,” he agrees, and rolls over.

When his breathing has evened to a low hum, John sits up, unstraps his prosthetic, and curls into himself with a wince. He’s not just resisting an urge, he’s resisting several. If it were as simple as love, then this would ache differently, but it’s nothing so vapid. John didn’t used to feel anything particularly, and now he cannot keep his insides from rattling, making sounds. He could crawl on top of Flint and do whatever he wanted, and Flint had known that, and had chosen to sleep beside him anyway, the idiot. 

John doesn’t touch him, and falls asleep facing the other way. Three hours pass and they wake sweating to Billy’s fist rattling the door.

 

—

 

John knows the lines as if he had written them himself. That’s not entirely true, actually—yes, he could have put the words together in that same configuration, but he could never have felt the thing behind them, the thing that makes Flint able to say them. John is not fighting this war because he dreams of a new world fully realized, he is fighting it because Flint does, and his loyalty has, against the odds, outgrown his survival instinct.

Max and Flint speak privately, yet even from the other side of the door, John knows exactly what is being said. 

“Am I correct in my assumption that Anne Bonny is your lover?” he’ll ask.

Max will probably not deny it. 

“Am I correct in the further assumption that the major inducing factor in your meeting with us was your trust in her and, to chance presumption, a wish to reunite?” 

Max is more likely to deny that, or even to say something along the lines of, “If that is the only thing that you have to offer me, Captain, then I am afraid I find your enticements lacking. Anne and I have already made peace with our separation, due to the circumstances of the lives that we have both chosen.”

Flint will not smile, he will not let on, he will nod and let his confidence be undersold, and he will say, “Then I suppose you have made peace with the necessity to wed, as well?” He will wait for Max’s frown to fully form, and then he will continue. “Nassau as it is now will not stand. In order to win the war, Rogers will allow the men their ways, their comforts, their lives as they have always lived them. Once—or, to be perfectly honest— _if_ he wins, however, the island will change. For the better, in some ways, certainly: no more danger, no more sailing away not to come back, no more fear of a naval invasion. But also, I would wager, no more women in charge of the brothel. Will they keep the brothel? I’m sure they will, but it will be cleaned up, and hidden, and taken from you. All your shares, your investments, your allies? The Englishmen who will come to live peaceably among the pirates in the new colony will not be pleased to see half the town owned by an unmarried negress. They will not pull your assets from your hands, surely, they are far too civilized for that. But they will marry you off to the highest bidding newcomer and he will absorb your money, your work, and your legacy into his own.”

Max’s frown will deepen, she will want to speak, but Flint, carefully, will continue before she pulls a response together.

“And just in case you are alright with this, resigned to forgoing all that you have built for the chance at a safe and respectable life, consider the fact that, though in England one is not outright prevented from taking a lover of the same sex as oneself, such a thing must remain a secret if one does not want find oneself ruined, hospitalized, or killed. Excuse me for assuming, but I believe from what I know of you that you are a woman who plays her cards carefully, and takes no unnecessary risks.”

Max, if she’s as frank as John remembers her, will plainly say, “You are insinuating that under English rule I will be loveless and lonely? Perhaps you think that because I am a woman I am swayed most fully by matters of the heart?”

And Flint will look straight at her, and he will be very brave, and he will say, “I am. Matters of the heart are why I left England, and why I will never go back. Matters of justice, as well, but the two are intertwined.” Then he will have her attention, and he will look out the window, and he will say, if he can—and he’d practiced enough, he can, he will—“I’m going to tell you a story about an Englishman named Thomas Hamilton.”

And Max, he knows, will listen closely.

 

—

 

tbc.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL. after five months, three drafts, and multiple declarations to myself that i "will never be able to write this fucking scene!!!1!" here is chapter two. at this rate humans will have cultivated settlements on mars before chapter three is done, but such is life. thanks to anyone who read + reviewed the last chapter, double thanks to anyone who still remembers this fic exists, triple thanks to reluming on tumblr for alway being a cheerleader, and quadruple thanks to my sister for a) taking my gosh dang rec and watching this gem of a show and b) encouraging me to finish.
> 
> this still takes place post-s3 and involves no s4 canon. i tried to get it out before the new season premiered but. yikes! i hope someone, somewhere, enjoys this.
> 
> (also, fairing warning: this fic is well and truly nsfw now.)

There is a balmy southern wind which wraps around the coast of New Providence in the tall part of summer, leading storms up on the strength of its gale and setting them loose on the bay. When, at noon, the _Walrus_ begins to quiver from shroud to sail, Mr. Biles calls it an omen—“And not the good sort.”

 John waits expectantly outside the cabin for the first hour, loses interest and departs by the second, returns to check in during the third, and busies himself with raillery among the men for the next two, on until the strain of the unknown curdles any appetite for diversion he might have forced. That there is business of immense importance going on beyond a door which is not open to him rankles harder with each passing hour, the more time for things to be said which he will never hear.

 When the sun is burning low against the water, he returns to find Bonny pacing outside of Flint’s cabin, looking much as he feels, and devises a distraction.

“Drink?” he asks, and she startles, scowls, but accepts.

They go to his cabin, recently her’s by extension of being Max’s, and he sets a bottle between them, without cups. Max’s shawl is thrown over the back of one of the chairs, the small hanging bed mussed by the press of more bodies than it is intended to accommodate. Bonny drinks first, mannerless and silent, setting the bottle down heavily upon the table and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“What you think they’re doin’ in there for so long?” she asks eventually, when John has wrung conversation from her by offering none of his own.

He shrugs. “I see it as being one of three options: either he’s killed her and is agonizing over it, she’s killed him and is deciding how to spin it to the crew, or—and this one seems the least likely, at this point—they’re still talking.”

“Maybe they’re fucking,” Bonny grunts.

“Oh?” John does not know how else to frame his amusement.

“Max’ll fuck anybody if it will get her what she wants.” She looks less distressed by this fact than she is entitled to be.

John blinks. “Well, unfortunately for her, the captain is slightly more discerning. Trust me, I’d know.” He takes a long and burning swig, more than a little gratified by the quirk of her brow as she tries to work through the latter remark.

“Fuck do you mean by that?”

There is an odd pleasure which comes tethered to shame. The more deplorable the depth of his feeling for Flint becomes, the more John is acutely aware of a desire to have it known. For it to remain unknown ignores a dimension to the dynamics of the crew, the council, and the war itself, just as Flint’s crusade against England has paid no outward heed to the man in whose name it was originally waged. Miranda Barlow makes a convenient martyr for the men of the _Walrus_ , but she was not the first martyr. Thomas Hamilton, the unsung champion of Nassau, hangs over all of this like a pall visible only to those who have been invited to see it.

The door creaks and the newly invited Max enters, looking depleted.

Bonny stands, John does not, and she glances between them uneasily. “What are you doing in here?” she says, voice absent of its usual calculated charm.

“Just passing the time,” John says carefully. Hostility is not something he had expected from her after their interaction the night before. As the only member of the crew with whom she’d previously held a rapport, he’d anticipated being treated to a level of favoritism. “We were starting to believe that neither of you would ever emerge from behind that door.”

“Well?” Bonny asks, voicing plainly the question which John artfully avoids. “Have you said yes?”

Max swallows, slipping into some quick decorum. “I have said many things, not all of them assenting, but if you are asking if Captain Flint and I have come to an arrangement, then the answer is, indeed, yes. If you would like to know more, I believe he has gone out to give a speech to the men.” She tilts her head toward the door, communicating with Bonny in a single look something that John would need a map to read, being a resident of his own quiet world and not the private one which they share between them.

Bonny’s face twists. “Ain’t he one of the men?” She nods at John.

“I would like a moment alone with Mr. Silver,” Max says, without addressing or acknowledging him. “Please, Anne.”

There is more of that language which he cannot comprehend, shot in quick looks of frustration which give way to acceptance, promise explanation. Bonny sighs and exits without argument.

Alone in his room with Max in her room, it is hard to know where the border of professionalism lies, made all the harder by the fact that she begins undressing as soon as Bonny is gone. John watches warily as she unlaces her bodice, wondering if anything is going to occur which would lead to his ending up in, say, Port Royal, with Logan and Charlotte, but she leaves on her shift and stockings, approaching him with her hand outstretched.

He blinks, and she rolls her eyes and gestures at the shawl hung on the chair behind him. Uneasily, he dislodges it and hands it to her, and once she has it on, cinched tight, creased cleanly, she takes the seat that Bonny had recently occupied and corks the bottle set on the table between them.

“For clarity’s sake,” she begins, regarding him mildly, “I will inform you that Anne is probably still listening at the door.”

John shrugs. “I don’t blame her. She sleeps in your bed, yet you do not trust her to be present for conversations of import?” There are several things he could add about Jack Rackham showing her no such dismissal, but he’s not decided quite how combative this conversation is likely to be, and doesn’t want to overstep first thing.

Max does not blink. “I asked her to leave in order to spare you some level of embarrassment.”

“And what would I have to be embarrassed about?”

“Your captain and I spoke, as I’m you sure realize, at great length. Though much of what we covered was political, more of it was personal.”

Something shakes within John. “There’s no need for you to skirt around Thomas Hamilton. It was I, after all, who convinced Flint to share his personal history with you as an appeal not only to your instinct for self-preservation, but also your moral judgement.”

“A shrewd tactic. One that speaks to your ability to seek out a person’s deepest vulnerabilities, and,” she says, “to exploit them.”

The ship rocks upon the water and John’s jaw clenches and releases. Max keeps her gaze steady, not accusatory, not quite, but unrelenting. From the other side of the door comes the rumble of a crowd drawing together, the first grim, shouted syllables of one of Flint’s inflammatory monologues cresting above the low din, carving monoliths out of empty air.

John says, “Make your point, Max.”

She crosses her hands upon the table before her and asks, conversationally, “Do you know who it is that reads Long John Silver’s letters to the land owners, to the politicians, to the English soldiers stationed in Nassau? Do you know whose desk they are set upon, each time that a new one appears?”

John is caught off guard. On Maroon Island, in the sprawl of heat and business, where nature tucks into civilization as a stray dog does its latest meal, and each sequential conference of political agenda is more abstract than the last, John had rarely thought of his caricature, running about, tying nooses and slicing up Englishmen, except in the context of what it had meant to Flint. Even back aboard, with Nassau looming against the horizon, holding his name in the back of its throat, it had not felt real. It still does not feel real.

He shifts in his seat. “If you and Flint spoke in such detail, surely he told you that I am not the author of those letters, nor am I the one carrying out the attacks they are attached to.”

Max sniffs. “I don’t care who is killing whom. Every day since I have lived in Nassau, somebody is killing somebody. The acts themselves matter little. It is the power that comes attached to them. Perhaps you have not heard the way that they speak your name, the awe that is attached to it, the fear. It dwarfs even the names of Teach, of Vane, when he was alive, of,”—she holds the next syllable back for a moment, as if taunting him with his anticipation of it—“ _Flint_. These are men who were known by reputation, but also by sight. You could find them at Eleanor’s bar, you could see them doing business. You are but a shadow, a ghost that haunts the island. You are not a man to them. You are a legend.”

That tickles the same place at the base of John’s spine that the press of Flint’s cock against his abdomen had when he’d pinned him to the floor, past the earnest trust of sharing a bed, trading confidences, and into the deeper, slicker pleasure of a fight fought dirty, a crown torn from a scalp.

He swallows, and refuses to indulge. “I am a fiction. There is really no such person as Long John Silver.”

“There was no such person as Captain Flint until he was invented.”

“But you trust him,” John says, the realization bitter and immediate, “and not me?”

Max leans forward, elbows on the table. “His ends are, little as he might like to admit it, more born of sentiment than they are anything else. Your ends, for as long as I have known you, in every situation in which I have worked with you, have been utterly self-serving.”

“Yes, well, people change, or hadn’t you noticed?” He kicks twice against the leg of the table, the iron clang of his prosthetic overly loud in the quiet room.

Max doesn’t flinch. “Do they? Do they lose limbs and become honorable men? Do they grow loyalty where once they felt none?”

John’s says nothing. He can devise no credible lie, and does not know how to bargain in truths. Nostrils flaring, he grabs up the bottle by its neck and takes a long drink. Max’s silence is pitiless as she watches him, but not cruel. He remembers her fingers on his cock, squeezing with bored precision, as he’d pressed his mouth between another girl’s legs, the dewy slide of female flesh and soft perfumes, lace chafing his thighs, hands in his hair. She is not that same woman, glittering and self-congratulatory. War has changed them both.

“What exactly,” John asks at length, “do you fear I’ll do?”

Max is no more given to straight answers than he. She glances past him, at the painting hung crooked above his seat: a trite ship on a trite sea, with an overly green island rising out of the mist behind it, hung by Gates when this cabin was his and untouched by each of its subsequent tenants out of respect, or, as in John’s case, indifference.

“I was at one time, you may recall,” she says, “very much in love with Eleanor Guthrie. I would have given her anything, but as circumstances have aligned themselves, everything that was once her’s is now mine.”

Her eyes drop back to John, and he takes the point.

“You believe I intend to do that to Flint?”

“I believe you no more capable than myself of resisting the lure of power when it is in front of you. And it is in front of you. Your captain and I spent the better part of the last six hours not just arguing whether we both wanted the same things for Nassau, or the best way to achieve them, or how Eleanor is to be approached and what is to be said to her, but also whether or not it would be wise for him to keep you in his confidence, let alone on his crew.” She speaks with gravity, without malice. “He was—not pleased by my suspicions of you, although he admitted the validity of every single one.”

John’s mind conjures up sprawling, semi-fantastical scenarios of Flint coming to his defense, listing in constrained sobriety everything that John has done for him, has said to him, every confidence kept, every moment of intimacy. That kind of vulnerability, even imagined, even secondhand, burns its way up the sides of his neck, fizzing at his temples. To tease the room with hints toward deviance is a vain game, but to have no choice, to be looked at and to be known by Max’s appraising eyes, to have the value of his emotions weighed against the likelihood of his betrayal—well, perhaps to have emotions at all is to ask for this.

He swallows, dry throat scraping itself dryer. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because your captain probably will not, and because I want you to know that you are being scrutinized, and that while he is, might we say, emotionally compromised to the point that he will selfishly risk the danger that you pose, I am not.”

“And here I had thought we were friends,” John says.

“I regard you highly. Don’t mistake that. But I do not trust you, and all the less so for how much Flint does.”

That splashes in the shallows of open wounds. From the other side of the door, Flint’s voice booms with the fervor he has worked himself into, shivering the hinges, demanding entrance. John knows the anatomy of his tirades back to front, just as a disciple knows the Sunday sermon.

“You’re not wrong,” John says. “If I were at all able to betray him, I would have done so twenty times over by now, but I,”—the words get caught in his throat, falling back to the heaviest part of his chest. How to admit to what you cannot describe? How to name the nameless thing that binds one person to another, and tricks them out of a wish to be unbound? “You do not have to worry about where my loyalties lie.”

Max’s gaze is sharp upon him as he rises and limps to the door, voice sharper still: “I have to worry about everything.”

 

—

 

Night has settled on the water and Flint’s voice blares through the wind.

“In war, it matters not whose crew you’re on, or what captain you’re under, only what side you belong to. England would like you to believe that you have no country, that in rejecting the rule of the crown, your only recourse is straggling isolation on the outskirts of an empire which will either destroy you, or pull you back in.”

John cannot slip through the crowd unnoticed, the uneven rhythm of his gait revealing him even to those with their backs turned, so he doesn’t try. The eyes of the men follow him, withdrawing momentarily from Flint, flickering between them, attention drawn in two opposite directions. John could limp to the front and they would part for him like a sea, could settle into the shadows at Flint’s right hand.

Instead, he keeps walking.

“But if we have no country,” Flint continues, cadence unbroken, “then what it is that they took from us in Nassau?”

Bonny passes him without meeting his eyes. Their shoulders brush, but he takes no insult. She goes straight for the door he’d just exited, and he goes as far as he can in the other direction, as far as he can get from the noise.

“If we have no country, then what are we fighting for? Our lives? The lives of our brothers, our women, our rights, our freedom? And a place to keep these things safe, a place that is ours. What is that, if not a country? What are we if not an army, defenders of our land? What is that island if not a fortress against the world?”

When John reaches the prow, the rush of the wind is so loud that it almost drowns Flint’s words out. They become dull and indistinct, easy to ignore. For a moment, John is blessedly alone. Then, either from a dip in the current or a rise in Flint’s pitch as his address reaches its peak, the words ring through clear:

“Who are we, if not our own kings?”

 

—

 

News of the accord with Max exacerbates the mood to new heights of frivolity. The crew has never achieved so much with so little effort on their own part, and for some reason take this as a reason to celebrate themselves. John works his way back through the crowd, and around him laughter booms and rum sloshes, men whose legs carry them up wind shook rigging of a day allowed at last to busy themselves with naught but keeping time with the music, feet tapping, hands clapping, eyes squinted with the relief of merriment. It is a tense world, and this is their respite. Flint and his men are not fighting for the same kingdom; this, here and now, is their kingdom. The wish of an aging man to retire to a quiet house far from any coast is a wish of his own. The rest of them advance it by coincidence.

John is following the quiet house, though he is not sure that he can live there.

He wonders what Madi would say, if she could see him hesitate outside of the captain’s quarters, hand upon the knob. If she knew of the nervous pleasure he took in being expected. He wishes she were here. He wishes someone was around who could speak sense to him.

The door creaks open and creaks shut; John is long past knocking. Flint is on the bed, boots set beside the door, jacket hung upon the hook, eyes closed and breath even. He’s not asleep, but he would like to be.

“Long day?” John asks. His uneven steps weigh heavily against the floorboards.

Flint’s eyes flicker open. “I’ve had longer.”

John pulls the captain’s chair from its place behind the desk and arranges it so that he’s as close to Flint as he can be without climbing into bed with him, slumping down into it and leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Was it difficult?” he asks.

“Which part?” 

“Telling your story to a stranger.”

Flint sits up. His eyes are blurry, his air quiet. He is always taciturn, but sometimes the very fabric of him vibrates, nerves grated down to sharp points, hands busy, head swamped. Other times he is imperious, his silence demanding, his eyes holding John’s the way a king holds court. In this moment he is absent all of that, a tired man in shirtsleeves who awaits the coming war like it’s a guest he hasn’t the energy to entertain.

He drapes his legs over the side of the bed and their knees brush, and if he notices—surely he notices—he doesn’t flinch.

He says, “It was easier than one might assume. Certainly easier than telling you, and so far,”—here, a slim smile—“twice as beneficial.”

John’s lips curl, the tenderest places beneath his throat growing warm. It is easy to believe that they might carry on like this, strung halfway between two kinds of intimacy.

“I spoke to Max,” he says.

Flint’s expression loses its warmth. “Did you?”

“She implied that you spent a significant portion of your conference defending my character.”

Flint shifts minimally, adjusting his legs so that they are no longer touching John’s, and examining something past his shoulder. “You misunderstood her. I was defending my decisions as your captain.”

“Certainly,” John says, glib and unconvinced. 

“Her worries are valid,” Flint continues, arguing against no opponent beyond the knowing look in John’s eyes, “but she would prefer that I send you back to Maroon Island, where you would be idle, and far from the masses that quiver at your name, and I, on the other hand, would like to keep you where I can watch you.”

He is not watching now, though, and John dislikes that. 

Taking a liberty that he will almost certainly be punished for, he reaches out and grips Flint by the chin, fingers gentle but demanding, drawing his eyes back and holding them steady. Flint, for his part, doesn’t immediately break his wrist, but allows himself to be ordered around by John’s insistent silence. If he pressed his thumb to Flint’s lips he might sneer, and if he pushed it past them he might bite, but resting there, against the wiry brush of his beard, there is nothing for him to do but look.

“Last night I slept in your bed,” John says, and Flint doesn’t dispute the fact, though he does swallow. John feels it in the flutter of his throat. “Tonight I’m going to sleep in your bed again.”

“You’re pushing it.” Flint’s voice comes out low and rasping.

“You’re letting me.” 

The floor rocks beneath them, shifting one way and then the other, and they angle themselves with it reflexively. Flint says, “You know I could break all of your fingers,” less a threat than an observation.

That makes John grin. “I do know.” He releases Flint’s chin, but rather than withdraw his hand limply to his lap, he follows the line of Flint’s neck down to his collar, the rumpled white cotton which he straightens, folding out the creases with deliberate attention. “I used to be so afraid of you,” he says. Flint’s skin is bed warm when it brushes his knuckles. “I don’t think I’d ever been so afraid of anything in my life. No other threat had been so immediate, so constant and inescapable. And now,”—he abandons the shirt, spreading his palm over Flint’s bare collarbone,”—“how the tables have turned.” 

Flint catches his wrist, but doesn’t remove him. “You flatter yourself. I am not afraid of you.” 

“Aren’t you? Isn’t that the crux of the matter? If you weren’t, then you might be able to admit…” John does not know how to express what he can hardly keep hold of. What tethers them is amorphous, and all the names he could call it by are false and overly sentimental.

“Admit what?” Flint’s grips tightens, needling his bones. “Have I not admitted enough? Has my life’s story, my entire reason for being, not satiated you?”

He is growing flushed. He has the sort of skin for flushing, pale and freckled beneath all that bluster, skin that buzzes hot in John’s mind, all the more desirable for its unattainability. But in this moment it is attainable. The costumes have been worn away. John feels almost guilty for coming to him after he had spent the day laying himself bare, only to ask that he bare more—but the guilt is part of the thrill. 

He says, “No,” very deliberately, gaze dropping down over Flint’s body, the slump of his shoulders, the stiff jut of his knees, his wool socks; then up again to his face, his parted lips and stricken brow, eyes glassy and expectant. John wets his lips. “I want to suck your cock.”

Flint breathes out heavily through his nose, dropping John’s wrist. “Don’t,” he says.

“Don’t suck it?” John cannot help the grin that twitches on the edges of his lips.

“Don’t say that.”

There is nothing of rejection in Flint’s posture, though. His breath comes faster, more audibly, and his eyes catch unmistakably on John’s mouth, color rising up the line of his neck to settle below his ears. They are close enough that John can feel the heat coming off of him.

He leans forward, elbows upon his knees, eyes dropping to Flint’s lap before flicking back up again, and says, undisguisedly smug, “Because it makes you hard?”

“Because it makes me want to take Max’s advice and get you the fuck away from me.”

But he does not get John the fuck away from him. Rather, he angles himself forward, knees parting, body thrumming, fingers clenched upon the quilt, his chest rising with the depth of his breath, the uneasy desire blatant on his face. John wonders how long it has been since he has touched a man, wonders if he thinks about it often, if it keeps him up at night, if he feels shame, or only rage. Does he still imagine Thomas Hamilton above him, or has enough time passed that there have been a myriad of faces in his place, crewmen, men on the streets, men in battle who hold knives against his throat, whose throats he holds knives against?

John slides his hand up his thigh just to see if it will be batted away, and when it isn’t, slides it further. Flint shudders, his arousal indiscreet, his eyes bright and locked on John’s face, fluttering closed when John cups his cock through his trousers. The press against his hand, the urgency and the heat, are almost unexpected, fully outside John’s realm of experience and a little bit dizzying. John wonders how long he’s been hard, how often he gets hard during their conversations, how often during their arguments. He squeezes and watches the muscles of Flint’s arms quake.

Abruptly, he withdraws, standing shakily—too much pressure on his left leg, too fast, it aches—pushing his chair back to make room. Flint watches him, dazed and aroused and almost certainly a little bit frightened, and John is a little bit frightened, but his cock is also pulsing and that outweighs everything else, makes him, against the anticipation of pain, lower himself to his knees. 

“Max is right about some things,” he murmurs, swallowing the pangs that rise up from where his prosthetic bends awkwardly against his stump, watching Flint’s face, the twitch of awe, the acquiescence. “I could be their king. I could be your king. What she doesn’t understand is that I choose to kneel.” He follows that remark with a slow, self-satisfied smile.

His discomfort must be evident, though, because Flint frowns, leans forward. “Your leg,” he says, voice still hushed and gravelly.

John’s smile falters to a grimace, but he shakes his head, with a look asks Flint not to speak of it. Whether selflessly or selfishly, Flint allows him his pride, although his eyes are more watchful, his shoulders stiffer.

“What happens when you change your mind?” he asks. “When you decide that you are tired of kneeling?”

John’s hands go, distractingly, to his belt, and the clink of metal against leather almost disguises his softly breathed, “I don’t know.” Pain has sapped his confidence, if not his erection, and once he looses Flint’s every button, it is difficult to know how to proceed. 

“You’ve never done this before,” Flint observes, after a still moment, and it could come out cruel but it doesn’t, only hushed and slightly reverent.

John huffs, “A year ago I’d never pirated before. Now, look at me.”

Flint does look at him, as John palms his cock, pulling it from his underthings and feeling the wet slide of the tip against his fingers, a weird pleasure, a low sudden new pleasure, unlike conversation, unlike argument, unlike the long and personal silences that they share, but something all the stronger, something demanding. John strokes it once, and again, faltering and without rhythm, marveling at how Flint has ceased to stand against him, ceased to question his motives, only presses up into his palm and holds his eyes open and breathes heavy. 

John understands now that this is exactly what Flint had been resisting. He leans forward to kiss the tip of his dick.

Flint’s breath jolts, his eyes dropping closed, face twisting into a wince, and he catches John by the shoulder, palms sliding up his neck, fingers tangling into the hair at the base of his skull, not rough, but cautious, as if he feels he needs to keep hold of John to reign him in. John slowly sucks the head, figuring out how to bend his lips and where to put his tongue and how to angle his jaw. 

He has never sucked anyone’s cock before. He’s wanked a few fellows off, bunkmates on long hauls mostly, tedious and rarely titillating, and not out of desire for anything but the favor returned and a good night’s rest. This is so dissimilar as to be incomparable. What John wants from Flint goes further than pleasure and demands more than reciprocation. He wants to strip him out of his clothes, and then to wear his clothes, wear his crown, hold his scepter.

Flint grunts when he sucks him deep, grip tightening in his hair, hips jerking up to meet him, and John feels slightly overwhelmed, finds this is harder than he’d expected it to be, finds his throat unaccommodating and jaw more susceptible to ache than he’d supposed. His leg hurts, the metal contraption pressing up at an odd angle, and the pain pulses through his whole body, rhythmic, necessary, in its way. It is easier for him to keep his head, though his cock throbs in his trousers, his breath comes heavy through his nose.

He pulls off slickly, his mouth tacky, tasting of salt and musk. It’s not entirely a pleasant taste, but it riles him, keeps his hands steady as they stroke, and he cannot really imagine doing this for anybody else, kneeling for anybody else, letting anybody else grip him by the hair and push their cock between his lips, but Flint has every allowance, every imaginable privilege that John could grant him, and there is no way to stop it, no way to deny him, and more than that, no _will_ to deny him.

He grips Flint’s trousers, forcing them further down his thighs, revealing more, hands frenzied against his skin, and dips his head down again and drags his lips, light as anything, along the head, down the shaft, not giving but withholding, breath hot against the flesh. Flint’s fingers dig into John’s scalp and he grunts, half a word, half a demand which he cannot bring himself to fully say.

“Hmm?” John asks, pulling back. 

Flint opens his mouth and answers him with a shuddering exhalation, unwilling to be made weak, even though he must see—mustn’t he?—how weak he has made John. 

“How long must you have wanted this,” he says, egged on by Flint’s silence. “How often must you have denied yourself. As often as you denied me, at least.” The tip of Flint’s cock leaks as he tugs it, slow and ungenerous. “It’s not right that you should be allowed to ignore it, and I should be unable to. I know this is exactly what you’re afraid of—that we should, at last, be incapable of denying each other. That you will not be able to deny me,”—he punctuates this with a firmer, more magnanimous stroke—“ _anything_.” 

Flint’s legs strain on either side of him. He wraps his fist tight in John’s hair, dragging him up by his roots so that their faces are centimeters away.

“You’re not king yet,” he says.

The implicit inevitability makes John harder. He could tear out of Flint’s grip and try to force him into one of his own, but oneupmanship is only a performance.

He kisses Flint because it is worse, because it is more difficult, because it is more dangerous. The physical pleasure of a hand, a mouth on his cock is easy to excuse, to justify, to put away in a box of things that are not touched except in the dark. John presses his lips to his and requests a further concession, chapped dry, wet slick, the unbelievable warm gratitude of the feeling, the closeness, the hunger that pulses in his gums.

Flint shudders into him, kisses back, and in doing so must confirm his own fullest fear, the one below betrayal, deep beneath sabotage, the one that tells him in certain terms that Thomas Hamilton can no longer occupy his pedestal alone. He has a visitor.

John practically crawls into Flint’s lap, joints knocking in odd places, his prosthetic mishandled, his hands fast and pushing beneath all of Flint’s clothes. The buttons of his shirt, the warm cotton beneath that, the hot press of his skin, and how strong he is, how unbelievable his might, how uncharacteristically is slackens, weighed down by John’s body. He pulls John’s jacket from his shoulders, the buckles clanging when they hit the floor, the floor rocking with the sea. Flint’s cock gets so wet in his hand. He strokes without restraint, grinding himself against Flint’s hip, his thigh, the heavy pulse of his cock in his trousers blurring all sensible thought processes until all that’s really left in his head is filth, the needy hungry dirty wants that underly men’s actions, that control what their mind cannot.

In a weird moment of aroused clarity, he realizes that every fight with Flint, either private or public, whether about the war or personal politics, is in some way linked back to this, this moment of mindless rutting against one another. Even before he’d found out about Thomas, it was there, underlying every interaction, this tension, unresolvable because it was impermissible, unthinkable.

Now here it is: permissible, thinkable. Flint is shaking in his grip.

“Flint,” John gasps in his ear. “Flint. I’m going to,”— 

John doesn’t know what he’s going to do, going to say, but it doesn’t matter. Flint comes in his hand, jaw clenched and throat grinding, with no sound but a strained grunt. John feels it all over his palm, holds Flint steady by the shoulder as his body heaves.

He slumps down into the bed and John stays stiff atop him, watching his eyelids twitch, the clench of his jaw finally loosen, feeling him soften in every way as his breath comes heavy. John bites down on his own arousal and sits up, extricating himself with effort. Flint blinks at the shift, dazed and almost insulted, until he realizes that John is only moving to grant his leg a much-needed respite.

He pushes himself up on his elbows. “Does it hurt?” 

John digs his fingernails into his palm and gives him a placid look. “It’ll pass.”

The air is still hot between them.

Flint sits up, settling beside him so that their shoulders brush, his skin thrumming and warm. They often sit like this: brothers-in-arms, partners, making plans, having jokes between them. Absent his usual awkwardness, Flint slides his hand up John’s thigh and cups his cock where it presses hard and not nearly satisfied up against his trousers. The weak gasp that John gives will not be noted for the record. Flint’s nostrils flare as he undoes his buckle, fumbling with his buttons, finally gripping John’s flesh in one rough, calloused tug.

“Fuck,” he says, as Flint watches his face and he watches Flint’s hand. “ _Fuck_.”

How foolish either of them had been to suppose that John could control Flint with sex; he can barely control himself.

He grabs onto Flint’s arm, pulling him in closer, gripping his chin and forcing him into a kiss without waiting for reciprocation, or even acquiescence, hips bucking up into his slick palm. He’s more desperate than he’d like to be, but how can he calm himself, reign in his wants, when he has been waiting for this for months, been teased with it so often, been invited to fantasize about it by Flint’s every close-quartered murmur, every compliment, every insult, every grin.

“You need me,” John groans, because it is true, and because it makes his dick throb to see Flint’s glazed look as he is unable to deny it. “You _need_ me.”

Flint’s other hand slides into his hair again, and John grunts against his mouth, leaning into the grip, wanting more than he knows how to ask for. Flint placates him, rubbing the head of his cock, making him—

There’s a succession of heavy thuds and it takes John longer than it should to realize that someone is knocking at the door.

Flint pauses, but makes no move to answer, though his grip loosens. John tries to reign in his breathing. After a moment of tense silence, the knock comes again. “Captain!” Billy calls, voice muffled but recognizable. “Captain, are you in there?” 

“Come back later,” Flint yells.

“Captain, you’ll want to come out here right now!”

Sneering, Flint stumbles to his feet, snatches up an ill-used shirt with which to wipe himself, and fastens his belt with a wild look, shooting John a glance that suggests that he expects him to do the same.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” John says, but sits up and, with effort, replaces his cock in his trousers, teeth clenched all the while, strung taut and unable to think of appearances, unable to think of anything but getting off.

Flint does not go straight for the door, but wipes his hands upon the shirt again, straightens his trousers, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, straightens his trousers again, gives John a short look of review—as if to measure the degree which he appears to have recently had Flint’s tongue in his mouth—and, wincing at what he sees, stomps to answer.

“What?” he asks, in a flat, brutal voice which suggests that anything less than the British Navy itself scaling the fucking hull will find Billy’s eye blacked by the force with which the door will be slammed in his face. 

John cannot see Billy, Flint’s body blocks him entirely from viewing or being viewed from the room, and he cannot make out what he says, but he does hear the panicked cadence of his voice, watching the way that Flint’s posture shifts with every word from defensive to righteous, inhabiting the figure of the dread captain in a matter of seconds. Without a glance back at John, he shoves past Billy, out onto the deck, and begins shouting.

The impediment removed, Billy catches sight of John on the bed and stops short in his withdrawal. He opens his mouth, closes it, and then after a moment, says measuredly, “You’ll want to come out here, too.”

He must realize. There’s really no disguising it, not with John’s flush, or the way he leans forward over his knees to cover his bulge. He would almost like to confirm it for him, to say, “Yes, the captain was just wanking me off rather well, so if you wouldn’t mind giving me a few minutes to myself, I’ll be right along.”

Instead, he feels his cock start to droop as the shouts from the deck come ever louder, shaking with increasing levels of alarm. He swallows and asks, “What’s going on?”

“It’s the Spanish,” Billy says, with tired finality. “The Spanish Navy has finally come to retrieve what we’ve taken from it.”

 

—

 

Max is not disheveled, but neither is she decorated, the fine lines of kohl which usually border her eyes smudged away, her ears and neck bare of jewelry, her typically creaseless linens wrinkled in her haste to pull them on. Bonny looks more herself, worn and rumpled as ever, hat pulled low over her brow to disguise any expression of embarrassment at being pulled from her—or, rather, John’s—bed by the rallying cries of panic. 

“Let me see.” It is a command and not a question, and DeGroot hands the spyglass to John without resistance.

There is no mistaking her. Riding upon the horizon is a Spanish warship twice the size and strength of the one that they had taken over in pursuit of the Urca gold, and every man aboard the _Walrus_ , whether he has gotten a clear look or not, is agitated with awareness of this fact.

“Shit,” John breathes. “Is she here looking for us, or is this some kind of hilarious coincidence?”

“I fail to see any humor in the situation,” DeGroot bites out, his usual stodginess tempered with unconcealed fear. “Men are going to die today.”

John hands the spyglass back to him, eyes locked on the pinprick in the distance. “Not if we can catch the wind quick enough. We’ll leave her in our dust.”

“Haven’t you heard him? He’s not going to leave.”

John’s reply drops dead in his throat. He excuses himself without ceremony and takes the steps down from the quarterdeck two at a time, folding between the crewmen that dodge about on Flint’s orders, manning sails and climbing shrouds, gathering supplies for a venture so foolish that John hadn’t even bothered to fear it up until now.

The thud of his iron leg upon the deck warns Flint of his arrival before he speaks, and he turns quickly to catch John’s eye, even as he’s midway through shouting an order. There remains in his expression but the barest glimmer of the man who was not ten minutes ago burning under John’s touch, eager and undisguised. It flares momentarily as he absorbs the implication of John’s body language, the strain in his shoulders and twitch in his jaw which make obvious how fully unsatisfied he has gone. 

If Flint takes some quiet, personal thrill from that, it is sapped the instant that John says, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“What needs to be done,” Flint bites back, shoving past him with tyrannical disregard. “Is the launch ready yet?”

“Just a minute, Captain,” Moorely calls back from across the deck. “Just a fuckin’ minute!”

“The launch?” John wheels about heavily. “We need to leave now if we’ve any hope of surviving to see the sunrise, and you’re readying the launch?" 

Flint doesn’t wait for him, shoving through to the opposite end of the deck. “If we leave now then there is no way that Max makes it back to Nassau by noon tomorrow, which means that Idelle will inform Rogers of her whereabouts, effectively ensuring that our plan to sway Eleanor’s allegiance dies in its infancy.”

John catches him by the arm. “And what good is Eleanor Guthrie to any of us if we’re sunk to the bottom of the ocean? They’re going to annihilate us.” 

Flint spins on his heel, taking two steps too many so that he bears down over John. “Assuming that they do catch us—which they may not, if you will allow things to get underway—they won’t see us dead until they get their gems, and they _won’t_ get their gems. If we can hold them off for long enough that Max has time to inform Eleanor of my offer, then everything will go to plan.” Tiny flecks of spittle fly from his mouth and land on John’s face. “If the Spanish Navy is already here, it means she and Rogers are in just as much danger as we are, and since she knows that I have access to the only thing that will see them safe, she will have no choice but to parley with me on my terms.”

“You’re not going to have any terms left once they fucking kill you.” John feels the muscles of Flint’s arm clenched and shaking beneath his touch, and wonders if this conversation might have gone very differently if they hadn’t spent the previous half hour weakening one another by degrees. It has become less a discussion of tactic and more a competition of ego. He softens his voice, tries to appeal to something beneath the veneer of supremacy. “Flint, this is madness. I’m not going to let you,”—

A miscalculation, certainly. The moment the word _let_ passes John’s lips, Flint tears himself from his grasp and, in a voice measured enough not to have the implication misunderstood, says, “You’re _not_ _king_ _yet_.”

Holding John’s stare for just long enough to betray his fear, he swerves back into the throng, seeking out Max where she watches from the quarterdeck, Bonny and Billy arguing behind her. The night hangs heavy on all sides. 

“I understand your concern, but we can’t just give the two of you a boat and hope you’ll hold up your end of the bargain, can we?”

“Could do. You think I’m going to row off into the sunset with her when Jack’s still on that bloody island, running your shit for you?” 

Flint pays them no heed, nor acknowledges John’s unwelcome presence at his shoulder, addressing Max with every appearance of calm civility. “Are you ready? You remember all that we rehearsed?”

In the midst of the shouts and hollers, Max speaks with a low, even fluidity. “If you are going to place your faith in me, Captain, then do not do it in halves. I recall every syllable.”

“Good.” Sparing not a moment, he sets his line of sight over her shoulder, and says, “Billy, I trust you’ll put Madame Max’s safe return to Nassau above all else, no matter how things appear to you to be going back on the ship.”

Billy opens his mouth and flicks his eyes to John, entreating him, as usual, to steer Flint’s mind away from this latest bout of madness. John just blinks back at him.

“I’ll go with them,” Bonny says, before Billy can respond one way or another. 

The flat, grim line of Flint’s mouth contorts. “Nonsense. We need every able-bodied fighter we can get aboard this ship, should it come down to it. Your personal attachments are irrelevant to the task at hand.”

“Fuck they are,” Bonny says, garnering new heights of respect from John with every word. “I’ll see her safe.”

“ _Billy_ will see her safe.”

“Billy don’t give a shit about her, and he’s doubting your plan besides.”

At her side, Max’s mouth twitches up at its corner. John does not doubt that a similar slim grin is growing onto his face, less out of the pride Max must feel and more out of the very personal and somewhat indecent pleasure he takes in seeing Flint challenged.

“Now hold on a fucking minute,” Billy starts. 

“He’s hearing the sense in what John Silver’s saying,” Bonny says interrupts, jolting a quick glance his way—and not long ago she might not have even known his name, might have called him _‘the quartermaster'_ or something to that effect, except now his name is everything, is everywhere—“same as we all are, except I ain’t too heartbroken if you lot get blown to bits, and he’s real bent up about it.”

“Launch is ready, Captain!” Moorely shouts.

Billy’s jaw grinds with irritation. “I gave my word that I’ll get her to Nassau, so I’ll get her to fucking Nassau. Doesn’t matter what _I_ think of the plan.” He gives John a pointed look which John pointedly ignores.

“Fine,” Flint says icily. “You can both go.” 

“What?” Billy brow folds inward. “You just said you needed every able-bodied fighter you could get.”

“Every one with a mind to listen. We haven’t the time for dissent, and Max’s chances double with the addition of a second bodyguard.” Flint grabs a spyglass from a passing crewman and examines the horizon. “Go,” he says, “ _now_.”

Bonny takes Max’s hand without hesitation, leading her across the deck, and Billy follows more slowly, catching John’s eye as he passes. “Handle this,” he says.

“It’s being handled.”

Flint tries to lose him, pulling DeGroot aside and muttering at him, pointing to the horizon, to the men on the foremast, back to the horizon, but there are only so many orders that can be given. John just waits it out, watching on mildly until DeGroot sighs his way down to the gunport, and then it is only the two of them within all this noise.

“So,” he says, blocking Flint’s path with his body, “you’ll take Anne Bonny’s advice now, but you won’t listen to a word that I have to say, even though my interests are utterly indivisible from yours, because—what? You’re still afraid.”

Flint scoffs. “I don’t have time for this.” 

“You’ll make time. You’ll let me _finish_.” The double-meaning burns warm between them. Flint’s expression spasms unreadably as John steps closer. “It’s not just the name, is it? The men aboard this ship have not heard half of the stories they tell of me, and those they have heard they know to be untrue—and yet, I still have just as much power here as I would have ashore, and you know that if I were to voice my opinion of this plan loud enough, it would sway enough of them for it to fall apart. You know that they trust me more than they do you, like me better than you,”—John is too close now; he wonders if he wouldn’t be saying any of this if he had only gotten to come—“and you’re _afraid_ of how easily I could dismantle your authority in a moment like this. You know that I could be the new captain of the _Walrus_ by the end of the day if I wanted to.”

The previous hour hangs heavy over this moment: Flint’s parted knees, Flint’s breath caught in his throat. John can think of almost nothing else.

“For that to happen,” Flint says, with unfaltering precision, “you’d have to kill me. The moment that I judge you capable of doing so, physically or otherwise, I will start to worry.” He tries to shove past John, could if he put his full weight into it, but he stops with the press of John’s palm to his chest, the dig of his fingertips.

John says, “Stay upon this course, and I won’t have to lift a finger. You will be dead by midday tomorrow, and so will we all.”

“We won’t. I have a plan. If you’d like to start a mutiny, though, by all means.”

“Alright, what’s your plan?”

Flint opens his mouth, jaw hanging tense on its hinge, then closes it again. He gives John a tightly wound and inorganic smile and shakes his head.

John says, “You still don’t trust me?" 

“Trust you?” Flint opens his eyes very wide. “How am I to trust you when you are doing exactly what you promised you had no intention doing, trying to use whatever sway you believe you hold over me to undermine my authority, and then feigning insult when I refuse to bow to it.” 

“This has nothing to do with,”—John starts.

“Silver.”

It is a lie they both know from end-to-end, and by this time it is just as hard to sell as it is to buy. John purses his lips and tries to remind himself that he is in the right. He is, but it is hard to remember when Flint is standing so close and his eyes are so hard and the whole ship is quaking with a new kind of fear.

“This threat,” he says at last, scrambling for some measure of truth, “here and now, is greater than any threat I pose or ever will pose to you. You’re gambling with men’s lives just to spite me.” 

“Don’t be vain,” Flint tells him. “If I did not truly believe that the course of action that I have taken was necessary for our survival, then I would not have taken it.” Then, voice lowering, as if it is something to be ashamed of: “I do trust you, against all good sense. Do me the courtesy of returning the favor, and you will not be let down.” 

He holds John’s eyes for a blunt and glinting moment, then shoves past him with full force. John lets him this time.

 

—

 

They fall behind the wind. Everyone, short of the cook and the bookkeep, realizes that they would not have had they weighed earlier, but few bother speaking of it now, and those that do are met by John’s forthright insistence that all is going to plan, and that the captain, that infernal magician, will see them through this just as he has seen them through every crisis before.

“But he ain’t got all of us through,” Biles says lowly, pacing the length of John’s cabin. “Crisp, Nicholas, Dobbs—all men that died on his watch, for his war. And where has it got us?”

John refrains from pointing out that Biles had been just as eager as anyone to chant the captain’s name earlier that night, when he’d perceived their victory as imminent, and appeals instead with, “Men die on all crews, Mr. Biles. If one wishes to avoid the dangers of sea, the obvious solution would be to keep one’s feet planted firmly on land. Or,” he adds, with a self-deprecating grin at just the right slant, “one’s _foot_ , as it were.” He stomps twice with his prosthetic and listens to Biles’s laugh lose a few degrees of nervousness.

He sniffs. “I take your point, Mr. Silver. But it’s, it’s not just them that comes to mind. Singleton, for one.” He swallows, voice welling with something John has little time to contend with. “Mr. Gates, for another.” 

Nothing moves in John. “Mr. Gates lost sight of the future. He could only see the present, and as it was a moment of immense struggle and confusion, began to doubt his captain. Do not make that same mistake. Faith in Flint may seem at times to be misplaced, and circumstances may align so that his plans become indecipherable, his motives unidentifiable, but for the sake of yourself and the sake of your brothers, trust me when I say that you must remain steadfast in your adherence to his will. That is the only thing that will see us through this.”

John cannot tell if he believes any of this.

He remembers the sight of Flint clutching Gates’s body, imposing agony upon himself when he just as well could have scrambled away, ignored the pulses of self-disgust, rejected the burden of seeing the sin for what it was. Whether it had been out of love for an old friend, or simply because he is a man enamored of his own misery, he had been sobbing his apologies. John tries to imagine a possible future in which he takes Gates’s place, falls limp and lifeless to Flint’s hand as his betrayer cradles him and begs his understanding, but it is not conceivable. Gates had stood between Flint and the monument that he intended to erect to Thomas Hamilton, the culmination of a decade of labor and hope all working towards one end: a safe, self-sustaining Nassau populated by decent men doing honest work.

But Flint no longer believes in that place. There is nothing for John to stand in the way of because there is nowhere for Flint to go. 

“I can’t lie and promise that I’ll keep faith in the captain,” Biles says, “but I will keep faith in you, and if you’re telling me to follow him, then I’ll follow him. And if I die, then I guess that puts my blood on your hands, instead of his, doesn’t it?” He gives John a small, lenient smile. “Sorry to do that to you, I suppose.”

“No matter,” John says, his throat tightening. “I will accept that responsibility.”

His hands are so utterly intertwined with Flint’s as to make the distinction meaningless, anyhow.

 

—

 

They almost make it. In truth, through Flint’s navigational expertise and the white-knuckled, fear-induced effort of the men, they get a lot further than John had expected, and might have wholly lost the Spanish behemoth had the weather been even remotely in their favor, but as dawn breaks over the sea in a lush of warm pinks and dappled yellows, the warship rises from the horizon on a fortunate wind, and within an hour of sunrise reaches firing range, signaling to the _Walrus_ to either let herself be boarded or face the canons. The men, sleepless and close to gnawing their fingers from their hands, labor momentarily under the fantasy that this ship had only happened on them by accident and does not recognize their flag, or else has failed to match the ship to the captain.

This hope, however, is dashed as soon as the captain of the _Soberano_ boards with a retinue of armed navy men and Flint stands to greet him by shouting, in grammatically correct but poorly accented Spanish, _“I am Captain Flint of the Walrus and I will surrender myself to you without resistance, on the grounds that no harm will come to any other member of my crew. I am the only man aboard this ship aware of the location of the cache which you seek, and will reveal that information only if my terms are met. If a single one of my men is put to the sword, I will take all knowledge of the cache, including the safeguards surrounding it, to my grave. Are these terms acceptable to you?”_  

Not every crewman is fluent in Spanish, but most know enough to get by, and the particulars of what Flint has said spread on low whispers through the crowd until there is little doubt as to his intentions. As soon as John realizes, through his own muddled interpretation, he begins forming intentions of his own.

The captain of the _Soberano_ curls his lip at Flint, mustache bristling, eyes hard. The buttons of his uniform gleam in the rising sun. “And what if,” he replies, in decent English, likely so that the crew at large will understand exactly what he’s saying, “we simply kill all of your men and torture the information out of you?”

This is what it comes down to, as it always, unfailingly, will: Flint’s ability to bluff, to posture, to lie through his fucking teeth.

“You could do that,” Flint agrees, squinting against the sun, “and perhaps eventually you would extract the information out of me, assuming you’ve got a man on board who is skilled enough with the tools of the trade to keep me half-alive for weeks on end, lowering me to the edge of death, letting me brush against it, and then hauling me back up again.” The ardor and specificity with which he describes his hypothetical torture, while mostly for show, still disturbs John insofar as he knows it to be informed by a true fascination with touching just such an edge, feeling just such a brush. Flint smiles a grim and boastful smile. “But I’m willing to bet,” he continues, “that I’ve got more experience withstanding hot irons and hooked knives than you’ve got time to employ them. You need that cache now, and I’m offering it. Why make things needlessly unpleasant?”

One of the naval officers sneezes. The Spanish captain’s face is hard and inscrutable, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his decorated hat. He says, “After all that I have heard of you, Captain Flint, I am surprised to find to that you would surrender without a fight.”

“It is a fight I cannot win.” Flint’s voice echoes across the deck, likely not to have his words heard clearly by his enemy, but by his own men. “These men’s lives are not worth sacrificing in a final battle when the war has already been lost.” 

And though they must know that it is all to some purpose, that the lives of a hundred—a thousand—men could not measure to what that cache means to him, to the freedom and the strength that it represents, the expressions of the _Walrus_ men begin to change. They look upon Flint with an admiration never before present, not in fearful awe but in true appreciation, nursing an utterly wrongheaded belief that Flint gives half a shit about any of them. Biles looks to John and gives him a short nod, as if he has finally understood his point about the captain, and means to offer John his apologies for exhibiting doubt. 

John returns his nod, and then, leaning in close to whisper to him, says, “Let the men know that I do this not in true contention with Flint’s plan, but in accordance with it, and that my only wish is to see that he makes it off of that warship alive, so that we may all stand on Nassau’s shores again as free men and rulers of our own fates.” 

As he pulls back, Biles frowns at him. “Do what?”

And as a contingent of the officers streams down into the _Walrus_ to guard the crew while another set leads Flint aboard the _Soberano_ , John pushes through the crowd to call, as believably as he can, “Captain, if you surrender the cache, you surrender everything! This is a betrayal to our very way of life!”

The captain of the _Soberano_ halts just ahead of Flint to turn around and snap. _“¿Quién es ese?_ Who the fuck is he?” Flint doesn’t answer, and even from the back of his head, John can see how displeased he is by this turn of events. “Who the fuck are you?” the Spanish captain calls.

“I,” John calls back, as several of the officers catch him by his arms, pinning them at his back, “am Long John Silver.”

 

—

 

They chain John up at the far end of one of two dank and stinking cells only after a short but brutal interrogation, during which he ensures that they believe him to have no idea where the cache is, communicates a thorough resentment of Flint for giving it up, and implies a level of rivalry between himself and his captain which involves as little fabrication as one might suppose. The stories, written by Billy’s noose as much as his pen, do the rest. His name strikes just as much, if not more, fear into the Spanish as Flint’s, and they hold him aboard the _Soberano_ under the guise of risk reduction. John suspects that they intend, instead, to kill him just as surely as they intend to kill Flint once he has delivered their gems, and live on ever after boasting the distinction of being the crew that slew the last two kings of piracy in the Bahama Islands.

Flint is brought in around noon, if John’s count of the hours is correct, and chained to the opposite wall inside the second cell. Through the bars there is an unimpeded line of sight between them, and John watches them rough him into the shackles, examines the fresh bruise purpling his jaw and the line of dried blood creasing his lower lip. The men spit a few disparaging remarks at them in Spanish before departing, the key turning heavily in the lock and leaving them in a decrepit silence. 

It lasts not ten seconds.

“What in the name of _fuck_ ,” Flint rasps, “do you think you’re doing?”

John shrugs. “Couldn’t let you have all the fun, could I?”

“What you mean to say, I’m sure, is that you couldn’t let a plan of mine proceed without twisting it to your own benefit.”

“My benefit?” John blinks at him. “I could be sitting right as rain back on the _Walrus_ with the rest of the crew, but instead I’m trussed up in the midst of smells so old there aren’t even names for them anymore, among men who are just waiting to be given the word to remove my head from my body—how do you suppose I’m benefiting, exactly? I’m here to make sure that you survive.”

“If I required your help, I would have asked for it.”

“You often require my help, and you rarely, if ever, have asked for it.”

Flint rolls his eyes, turning to scan the cell, the small porthole at the very top of it, the locks on the barred cell doors, the lock on the door to the room. John waits for a denial that doesn’t come. 

“What did you tell them?” he asks at length.

Flint turns back to him. “Are you supposing that I actually told them where it is?”

“No.” The thought had crossed his mind. At this point he’s unsure what Flint is and is not willing to do. “I’m just wondering what you said. I understand the gist of the plan, but I imagine it’s more ingenious,”—here, Flint scoffs; he has always loathed John’s ingratiating poses—“than I’ve yet realized. Where, specifically, did you send them?”

“North side of Maroon Island, where the rocks guard the shoreline and the gunmen patrol.” He cracks his neck one way, then the other. “They’re sending word to a smaller ship in the fleet to go and substantiate my information, but from that direction she’ll be spotted long before she gets within range, and Teach will have her blasted with holes once she does.”

“And when they realize that you’ve given them false information?”

“Even with the most fortuitous weather imaginable, it will take her four days to get there and four days, should she survive the encounter, to get back. If that’s not enough time for us to figure out how to escape these cells, gain control of the _Soberano_ , and regain control of the _Walrus_ , then we deserve whatever deaths they have planned for us.”

Flint sucks on his teeth and looks pleased with himself. The scabbing wound on his lip breaks open and dribbles blood, turning a brighter red.

“That’s not a plan,” John says softly, without censure, “that’s your enduring death-wish.” 

Flint sucks at the wound. “Well, then maybe you should have kept your head down and stayed on the ship where you would have been a little more useful, instead of insinuating yourself into a situation where you are neither wanted nor needed, simply because you cannot bear to see me stand above you, even in the eyes of our enemies.” He looks John up and down. “You must have your due, mustn’t you, Long John?”

Must he? It would be nice if pride had been the only factor which had motivated him to follow Flint into this cell. It would be nice if John could have his pride and his money and his health and nothing else, as he had once done.

“What did they hit you for,” he asks, shifting the subject, “if they thought you were telling the truth?”

Flint blinks, as if he hadn’t thought to wonder, then shrugs. “Sport, I suppose. I’m sure you can understand the urge.” 

John rolls his eyes. “Flint. The more time you spend treating me like I’m your enemy, the less energy you will have to defend against our actual enemies, among which we are currently alone, with nothing to sustain either of us but the other.” He swallows, putting on a thin and self-deprecating smile. “So, I suppose now the real reason that I designed to have myself taken prisoner is becoming plain.” 

Flint pauses with his mouth open, and swallows back whatever he was going to say, appearing to finally accept John’s offer of a truce. Carefully, he repeats an earlier intimacy: “Couldn’t pass up an opportunity to have me at your mercy?”

“And I,” John says, holding up his shackled hands, “just as much so at yours. As usual.”

Flint looks him up and down again, with a specific sort of care, his face flitting through expressions. “Sorry,” he says eventually, in that quiet way which he says things of value, “that you didn’t get to—finish. I fully intended to return the, ah. Favor.”

John doesn’t blink. “It wasn’t a favor.”

The muscles of Flint’s throat contract. “No, I don’t suppose it was.”

 

—

 

Time aches by. John tries to sleep, but his wrists begin to throb, and there is an airy pain in his stump that speaks of oncoming storms. Flint falls in and out of consciousness, they fall in and out of conversation, beginning at first with the material and immediate, fading out to the distant, the abstract, and the personal.

“How long?” Flint repeats back, brow creased, searching to remember. He shakes his head. “Before Miranda’s death, certainly.”

John nods, absorbs the information. “I wasn’t sure if…”

“We slept together?”

“If you were attracted to women." 

Flint takes that neutrally. For all his fears, his writhing inner demons, he never exhibits any shame regarding his proclivities. “I always knew, in a way,” he says. “In the Navy, it’s hard not to. But it was just one of those things, those small private sins we keep in our periphery, never letting them touch our perceptions of ourselves. It wasn’t hard to convince myself to fall in love with women, especially those as bright and as charming as the late Mrs. Hamilton. But, after Thomas, after we,”—he pauses, swallows, frowning at something just past John’s shoulder. “Nothing else could compare. Nothing that came before, nothing that came after. A different set of people might have tired to put aside their grief and make a life together, but not Miranda and I. Everything between us was drenched in grief. For ten years. Sex. Taking tea. It was…” He shakes his head, and does not complete the thought.

John does not know quite what to say, or how to say it. He has not seen Flint so clearly since that night at the campfire, before the battle. That first invitation.

“Somehow,” he tries, “I have trouble picturing you taking tea.”

The smile Flint gives him is genuine and complete, twitching to life on his downcast eyes. “I told you, you don’t know me. I used to take tea with the best of them. I used to go to dinner parties. I used to button my shirt to the neck.”

John shakes his head. Of this he is not unsure. “That’s not you. I know you. That’s just a memory of a man that you once were, a man that I imagine you must miss.”

Flint shrugs. “I miss being unruined. I had seen and done things then that made me think myself a hard man, but I was not. I was soft. I think that, if given the chance to be so again, I would take it without a second thought, even if it meant giving up—every part of my life now.”

He looks at John and John takes his meaning. It hurts, but he does not begrudge him it. John can stand to hurt a little more.

 

—

 

“Where will you go?” he asks later, between bouts of sleep and aching wide-awake exhaustion. “When the war is over, I mean.”

Flint does not open his eyes. “That depends on who wins.”

“If we win.” 

“Away, I think. I’ll get rid of this costume.” He opens his eyes, looks down at himself. “I’ll…”

“Find out what’s underneath it?” John supplies, and for once there is no innuendo, there are no veiled barbs, nothing but the very real things which all men keep inside for the occasion when somebody finally asks to see them.

Flint closes his eyes again. “Find out if there is anything underneath it.”

 

—

 

John shakes his head. “There have been no men. There have been… instances, of the common sort, when I was younger, on the trading vessels across the Atlantic that would go months without touching land. But I have never felt anything for any man. Neither have I felt for many women. I’ve never been one for… feeling.” 

Flint eyes him scrupulously. “And our young Madi?”

It is night again, and the waves break heavy against the hull. The storm passes them by, taking place several miles further out to sea, but they are rocked by vestiges of it. 

“I feel something for her,” John says, “but it is, by necessity, restrained. For the sake of the council, our relationship could not afford volatility. I have to be careful with her.”

“And me,” Flint murmurs, “you don’t have to be careful with?”

“I do. But it’s different. She will not stand for power games. But you like them, and I like them. And I like you. It really just comes down to that, I suppose.” John looks at his hands. 

Honesty does not thrill the way lying does, but it does steady him, make him feel more real. Down here in the dark he feels more real than he ever does swaggering about the ship, calling the men by their names and brimming against their respect. Long John Silver haunts the island, haunts the deck above and the water below, but here, in this room, he is not invited. Here, it is just John, as small as he has ever been. 

He cannot see Flint’s expression in the dark, but he can feel the measure of fondness between them bristle like a live thing.

“She is,” Flint says at last, “a smart girl, and a shrewd leader. I believe her to be good for you.”

John feels the blessing tingle down his spine. He hopes one day to be alone in a room with Flint again, without the chains or the bars separating them, and with the courage to ask him to say the words that wait behind the words he has just said.

 

—

 

“A house, maybe,” Flint mutters, out of nowhere, picking up an earlier thread of conversation. “I’ll get a little house, like the one Miranda kept, but on a different island, a place where Captain Flint is just a story, and they haven’t even heard of Long John Silver yet. I’ll have a house, and a garden, and a library, and all of those small daily pleasures which I have denied myself these last ten years. And I’ll die in that house. That is what I want.”

John does not know what to say to that, so he only watches Flint’s outline in the rising dawn.

 

—

 

It takes two days for the summons to arrive. Four officers, two for each of them, come and unlatch their chains from the wall and lead them up to the deck, where the captain of the _Soberano_ stands ready to climb into a skiff. The sun is peaking high, and, after so much darkness, John has to squint against the harshness of the day.

“I have received word from Governor Rogers and his people,” says the captain. “They believe your word to be worthless, and your information to be false.” He lets the accusation hang heavy upon them, and only when they glance warily between one another does he continue. “However, the Guthrie woman has offered every penny of her father’s remaining estate, including all assets seized from the former pirates of Nassau, for temporary custody of you, so that she might extract the _correct_ location of the cache.”

“And you believe,” Flint asks, brow crumpled, “that she will have success where your men did not?”

The captain of the _Soberano_ smiles. “It does not matter. We are going to burn her island and yours just as soon as the order comes. We might as well let her hand over everything of value that she has first.”

John panics mildly, but Flint does not look worried at all. He swallows his smile, and nods serenely. “I suppose that makes sense.”

And John—John trusts him.

 

—

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> i'm deathnoting @ tumblr if ya'll wanna talk at me about black sails anything. i'm desperate for black sails friends because none of my friends will take my g damn rec and watch this show.
> 
> thanks again for reading! pts 2 and 3 should be coming at you semi soon


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